Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable · HackerPapers discussions

Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by jraedisch

Mon, 16 Jul 2018 10:18:07 GMT

It is from 2013 https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by KirinDave

Sun, 22 Apr 2018 20:39:45 GMT

The PoW blockchain is slow to propagate updates but design. If you don't know how proof of work blockchains work, I advice you to Google around for a nice technical breakdown. Suffice to say, it is fundamental and a property people specifically code in to make blocks take a specific amount of time to complete. As for the 1/3 citation, I guess that's slightly less known: "Selfish Mining". Citation: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243 Of course "1/3" is a joke. It's actually closer to 1/4.

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by tchitra

Wed, 18 Apr 2018 15:14:21 GMT

While the analysis contained in this article is rather arbitrary, blustery and imprecise, there is a mechanism by which blockchains can serve as 'partially synchronized clocks.' One interesting facet about Bitcoin is that the model under which you analyze the effect of network delays can give you different results about how unsynchronized local copies of the blockchain can become. In the paper, "Analysis of Blockchains in Asynchronous Networks" [0], a certain (and more realistic) model is used in which adversarial miners are allowed to delay forwarding of blocks that they receive. The goal of…

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by JeremyBanks

Tue, 27 Feb 2018 03:38:20 GMT

More or less, yes. This is a known minor weakness in the protocol. See https://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by wslh

Thu, 07 Sep 2017 20:16:09 GMT

I even think that the issues with new cryptocurrencies is underestimated in the article. The problem goes beyond the cryptographic aspect to game theoretical challenges: the cryptographic protocols could be perfect and yet the cryptocurrency be insecure or offer a low security threshold. For example, Bitcoin is perfect from the cryptographic perspective but its security threshold is around 33% [1]. Last year we also started a spreadsheet to benchmark different cryptocurrency metrics [2] but the blockchain/cryptocurrency/ICO space outpaced this initiative ;-). [1]…

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by hellbanner

Mon, 17 Jul 2017 21:52:29 GMT

I see a lot of mention of 51% attack; the selfish miner attack could be done with closer to 33%(!): https://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243v4.pdf https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/38273/have-bitco...

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by emin-gun-sirer

Fri, 16 Oct 2015 04:32:42 GMT

Miner consolidation is a long-standing problem with Bitcoin itself. When Ittay and I discovered selfish mining [1], we were quite worried about the size of mining pools at the time. Even though we also came up for a fix against selfish mining, the fix only prohibits selfish mining for pools <25%, and we also found that there can never be a fix to prohibit selfish mining for pools >=33%. Things looked grim for a while, and we played a role in pushing back against GHash when they exceeded 51% around April of '14. The only tool that the community had at the time to break up large miners was just…

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by bennofs

Wed, 15 Jul 2015 07:57:11 GMT

Doesn't a technique like selfish mining (http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243) mean that you can undo past transactions faster than 2% of the time, though?

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by sp332

Fri, 18 Jul 2014 17:30:52 GMT

51% attack is not the only kind of attack. A "selfish mining" attack can break the system too. http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/ Here's the paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by gojomo

Sat, 14 Jun 2014 04:46:06 GMT

It's nice to hear that in your final paper you acknowledge the earlier discussions. You should link that final version from your author homepages. (The latest versions linked from you and your coauthors' pages, at arXiv [1] and Cornell [2], still have no mention of the earlier discussion.) If the FC14 version [3] is final, it's better, but I still think you're unfairly summarizing the key thread [4]. Every key aspect of selfish strategy is described there, from manipulating 'gamma' via network-tricks, to releasing the minimum number of 'secret' blocks, after each external-block, to maximize…

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by sigil

Tue, 21 Jan 2014 22:02:10 GMT

The selfish miner(s) build a blockchain in private and choose the right moment to reveal it. This paper describes it in more detail: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243v2.pdf

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by sigil

Tue, 21 Jan 2014 20:20:56 GMT

Bitcoin is the first practical solution to a longstanding problem in computer science called the Byzantine Generals Problem. Wait, isn't Paxos arguably the first practical solution to BGP? [0] [1] It's been in production use at Google since at least 2006. [2] Furthermore, Paxos actually has a proof that timely consensus will be reached. Do we have the same level of rock-solid mathematical certainty about Bitcoin yet? The Eyal-Sirer paper [3] from late 2013 raised some concerns about a new mining strategy that might lower the attack threshold from 50% to 33%. Ed Felton's group at Princeton…

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by dvanduzer

Thu, 26 Dec 2013 00:51:43 GMT

Thanks for taking the time to research and respond! So: 1) Dan's comments on Bitcoin in that BI article are a bit subtler than that. The very last section suggests (to me) that despite what value the BTC protocol has, it doesn't "square the triangle." 2) Dan is mainly talking about Sybil attacks in his 2011 post. The difference between a 51% attack and a Sybil attack is somewhat blurry, but here's my understanding: A Sybil attack can't be prevented if an attacker controls >33% of the nodes. This is a mathematical truth of distributed systems (cf. Byzantine Generals), but Bitcoin's…

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by hendzen

Fri, 06 Dec 2013 20:56:31 GMT

From the article: "I don’t understand why double spending can’t be prevented in a simpler manner using two-phase commit. What drawbacks and advantages does it have compared to the full Bitcoin protocol? uppose Alice tries to double spend an infocoin with both Bob and Charlie. The idea is that Bob and Charlie would each broadcast their respective messages to the Infocoin network, along with a request: “Should I accept this?” They’d then wait some period – perhaps ten minutes – to hear any naysayers who could prove that Alice was trying to double spend. If no such nays are heard (and provided…

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — HN submission

Sun, 10 Nov 2013 23:35:36 GMT

Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable

1 point; 0 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.

Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — mentioned by asperous

Tue, 05 Nov 2013 02:36:01 GMT

PDF source didn't work for me, here is a more direct link: http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243v1.pdf

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Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable — HN submission

Mon, 04 Nov 2013 15:20:13 GMT

Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable

200 points; 86 discussion replies on HN. Paper and source history. A submission is not an endorsement.