7 ms·

Auroracoin – Forked and Game Over

128 points by gionn 13y ago

Kiro 13y ago
I don't understand. Why is this game over?
- pat2man 13y ago
  Right now you could buy some auroracoins on cryptsy, try to sell them elsewhere and they would not be accepted because cryptsy and the seller are on different forks.
  - wdewind 13y ago
    Didn't bitcoin fork in it's early days and recover? What makes this unrecoverable?
    - smtddr 13y ago
      Early enough for not too many people to care. If you tried to fork bitcoin today, it'd would be freakin' OVER++.
      - tlrobinson 13y ago
        There was an accidental fork less than a year ago. A few miners lost money, but obviously Bitcoin recovered.
        smtddr 13y ago
        http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1a51xx/now_that_its_over_the_blockchain_fork_explained/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1a51xx/now_that_its... That was caught very quickly and due to a software bug instead of a 51% attack, which is the impression that I'm getting concerning Auroracoin's current problem.
    - gionn 13y ago
      It's usually recoverable by patching the wallet software, so that it recognize the block that caused a fork as an invalid one, so it will be skipped and not taken as the good one.
    - sp332 13y ago
      This is an active attack by someone with a huge amount of mining power. Those were software bugs that miners were able to coordinate fixes for.
      - runn1ng 13y ago
        It's actually not. It was a planned hard fork, just a lot of people (including pools and exchanges) did not update. It's going to cause a big mess.
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
- smtddr 13y ago
  Think of it this way, you create a bunch of purple 20 dollar bills and convince most(51%) of the population that your purple bills are the only legit ones. So people begin transactions with only the purple bills and green bills are worthless outside their little town(subnet)... but then someone else splits up these people again and convinces 51% that red bills are the only legit one. So now we have this mess where transactions and various business deals were made with green, purple and red bills and everyone is arguing about which color to accept. There's no sensible way to resolve this without nearly two-thirds of people being screwed... so you need to wipe everything out and start from the beginning. Which is lost resources for almost everyone. So there's no good ending. Any solution to this will cause over 50% of Auroracoin-holders to lose everything.... this is absolute worse-case doomsday scenario, assuming someone did a 51% attack with their own blockchain that may or may not be based on the original. If it's a fork of original, those who didn't trade and have their coins in offline wallets will be on all forks.
  - skybrian 13y ago
    That's an exaggeration. People who haven't traded since the fork haven't lost anything. If it's caught quickly and resolved, only some of the people who did trade since the fork lost something. An obvious workaround would be for the major exchanges to make sure they're on the same fork and stop all trades if anything goes wrong, until it can be fixed. Of course, the secondary effects from loss of reputation are a big problem.
    - smtddr 13y ago
      So, there are some caveats here. >>People who haven't traded since the fork haven't lost anything. If it's caught quickly and resolved, only some of the people who did trade since the fork lost something. T̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶s̶i̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶w̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶l̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶_̶I̶F̶_̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶i̶r̶ ̶c̶o̶i̶n̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶o̶s̶e̶n̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶l̶e̶g̶i̶t̶. Also, the people who keep coins in exchanges(against advise to do otherwise), if the exchange is operating on a losing fork... all costumers are kinda screwed. But you're right that if action is swift enough and some authorative-group of people can say "use this fork and ignore the other two", then minimal damage will be done. If this is not dealt with early enough.... ever second that goes by all kinds of transactions are taking place and if all major exchanges are not on the same fork, the exchanges running on a losing fork(and all its costumers) are in for some bad times. My guess is they'll probably have to pick the fork that has the most exchanges running on it. Or, if what I've read is correct and Auroracoin is premined... then those premined coins must be rescued. We'll see in the days to come what ends up happening... EDIT: To those who replied below me, you're right. If you haven't traded your coins are on all forks.
- gionn 13y ago
  For every new fork, is like that you have doubled the money in your wallet. Unfortunately, if you pay with the same money two different people, those two people can't trade that money together because they looks the same. And so you are splitting users that can exchange money in small groups, over and over again.
rsync 13y ago
I read a bit through the forum discussion and the part I find fascinating is that new cryptocurrencies, with low hash rates, are seen as targets ... and that there are high-hash-capability persons and organizations that will attempt to "break the bank" so to speak ... Which leads me to conclude that any new cryptocurrency would need to be launched by an organization that had the computing power to defend the currency (assuming it follows resource-intensive mining paradigms like bitcoin et. al) Can anyone comment on this interpretation ?
- sigil 13y ago
  Shouldn't the takeover risk be priced into a new cryptocurrency? If coin price > mining cost / 2, it becomes worth it to acquire 51% of mining capability so you can vote the other 49% to yourself, no? But then again, once you have 51% control and everyone knows it, the value of those coins quickly goes to zero. As is probably happening with Auroracoin as we speak.
  - wmf 13y ago
    In other words, the price of any new cryptocurrency (that uses an existing algorithm) should be zero, since a 51% attack is nearly certain.
    - sigil 13y ago
      Well not zero, just below half the mining costs, right? As long as it's below that, you still lose more taking over the new cryptocurrency than you gain. And that's also not taking the price drop post-takeover into account, which affects how much the attacker could actually cash out. But yeah, it would seem that miners of new cryptocurrencies should expect to lose money initially.
      - rblatz 13y ago
        That is ignoring people who do it for the lulz or to prevent competing coins from popping up.
    - 13y ago
deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
- gionn 13y ago
  This was the first most well known :P
  - deleted 13y ago
    [deleted]
    - solve 13y ago
      Nearly every coin, Bitcoin included, has had forks in it's early days. You guys should all be ashamed for being so gullible.
      - deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
        solve 13y ago
        No, Bitcoin and its successors are made to handle this exact scenario from the beginning. It's common on every coin. There would be no cryptocoins left today if they weren't made to survive this. Don't call me mate. Why do you think coins like Bitcoin require you to wait an extremely long time for "confirmations"? Why is an arbitrary number of "confirmations" chosen as "probably good enough"? This is exactly why. Forks can happen constantly. These coins are eventually-consistent by design.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]
solve 13y ago
Linkbait garbage. I don't like AUR much either, but this title is linkbait garbage.
buryat 13y ago
Everybody knew that it's going to die, no surprise. Though I'm not disappointed: I made over 20000% on AUR.
- tptacek 13y ago
  This casually written comment sums up most of what I think of cryptocurrencies in general.
  - compare 13y ago
    What I love about cryptocoins is that so many "book smart" people hate them. Bringing up the topic is an awesome way to find out who's stubborn and closed minded. Lately I've been using this topic as my "VC test" to decide what VCs I want to work with in my company's next round of investment, and my startup has nothing at all to do with cryptocoins :-)
    - tptacek 13y ago
      My comment was subtle perhaps to the point of being cryptic, but there was actual logic to it. Even if I was a believer in cryptocurrency, the comment I responded to was problematic. Your comment, on the other hand, simply asserts that anyone who hates cryptocurrencies is "stubborn and closed minded". That might be true, but for such an inflammatory argument, you probably want some evidence to support it. Good luck with A16Z. :)
      - compare 13y ago
        So there's logic behind the emotion, eh? :) Something eliminates the unknown and just leaves clear facts and logic? Yes, this is perfectly what I mean. I'm most impressed by the very smart man who is able to say "I just don't know". Book smart people you'll meet will usually reduce their world down to just 2 options: good or bad, will succeed or will fail. Where's the 3rd option? -- unknown, unknowable, we will see, no emotions because I just don't know. Admittedly, for most of my life I was never able to find a reason to believe that this 3rd option is a real thing. I always felt that "unknown" is just a temporary placeholder and that the answer is always really there, somewhere, if you're smart enough to see it. Never in all of my schooling was "unknowable and there's nothing we can do to find out" a legitimate answer. Well, I'm not telling anyone how to think. I'm just fascinated that some people think in these 2 modes, and some in 3.
chm 13y ago
I am disappointed by you guys. No proof was given anywhere. This is just scaremongering. No matter who BitcoinEXpress is, he didn't give proof. This was a planned hard fork, as you can see on the Auroracoin forums[1]. The fork was planned on block 5400, which happened today[2]. [1] http://forum.auroracoin.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=129 http://forum.auroracoin.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=129 [2] http://blockexplorer.auroracoin.eu/block/74546cee7f93595d36a4fb0f4fe62739ca5bced85eb4e368e4c6fee960e73476 http://blockexplorer.auroracoin.eu/block/74546cee7f93595d36a...
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
- mc_hammer 13y ago
  possibility it was a scam, the original post says you should sell before it crashes, someone could pick them up cheaper if the post caused a big sell-off (not even sure if u can buy aur idk anything about it)
- gus_massa 13y ago
  I was looking for more information, but I can’t find a site that has a visualization of the forks in the blockchain. Something like this, but with real numbers and more information: http://imgur.com/WNmNtaH http://imgur.com/WNmNtaH Is there a visual representation available?
  - chm 13y ago
    Not that I know of, but you'd be welcome to make an app out of this! I'm not sure it would be very profitable, but it definitely would be helpful :)
- LoganCale 13y ago
  Planned hard forks aren't especially uncommon, either. Dogecoin recently went through one.
- nailer 13y ago
  So... there's now two 'ledgers' of Aurororacoin? I get PKI and P2P but cryptocurrency is new to me. Why would you ever want to fork a ledger/blockchain?
e3pi 13y ago
coinmarketcap.com charts over 190 altcoins. 30 day chart: http://coinmarketcap.com/aur_30.html http://coinmarketcap.com/aur_30.html 7 day chart: http://coinmarketcap.com/aur_7.html http://coinmarketcap.com/aur_7.html
- gus_massa 13y ago
  Yes, it’s sinking, but this drop is caused by another problem. The pessimistic interpretation says that this is caused by a pump and dump scheme. The optimistic interpretation says that Auroracoin was heavily (50%) premined. The premined coins were stored and the amount was approximately 100x the amount of the new coins. In the last 4 days they started to distribute the premined coins to the Islanders. So the amount of circulation coins increased heavily, and the price dropped. It’s like inflation. I don’t have the actual numbers, but I think that the distribution of the coins was unsuccessful. If it were successful the price would have fallen even more.
gojomo 13y ago
Forum threads have announced 47 of the last 2 altcoin fatalities.
piratebroadcast 13y ago
Someone explain like I'm 5?
ing33k 13y ago
dogecoin faced some issues like this, but community is strong and people promptly update their clients when announced .
olalonde 13y ago
This is "just" a scheduled hard fork that went bad. The developers made a backwards incompatible change to the protocol and presumably, a sizable part of the network forgot or refused to update their client. While altcoins are more vulnerable to 51% attacks, 51% attacks do not result in hard forks. Hard forks can only happen when two or more incompatible clients are simultaneously used by the network participants. 51% attacks are easier to pull off during hard forks because the network's hashing rate is essentially split between the chains but there is no evidence that such an attack has occurred.
vsayer 13y ago
It's FUD guys. Scare tactics to make you dump your coins so scammers can buy low. Just please be sure to update your wallets.
victormx 13y ago
Just FUD, it's a hard fork, bitcoin has passed for this situations
runn1ng 13y ago
phpBB threads are so painful to read.
User54 13y ago
It was just one person who stated there was multiple forks, it was several posting on Reddit and Bitcointalk. A few them are developers. The hash rate jumped instantly from 1.6 GBS to more than 50gbs in a matter of a minute or two. There were clearly multiple forks for a time.

128 points by gionn 13y ago

Kiro 13y ago

I don't understand. Why is this game over?

pat2man 13y ago
Right now you could buy some auroracoins on cryptsy, try to sell them elsewhere and they would not be accepted because cryptsy and the seller are on different forks.
- wdewind 13y ago
  Didn't bitcoin fork in it's early days and recover? What makes this unrecoverable?
  - smtddr 13y ago
    Early enough for not too many people to care. If you tried to fork bitcoin today, it'd would be freakin' OVER++.
    - tlrobinson 13y ago
      There was an accidental fork less than a year ago. A few miners lost money, but obviously Bitcoin recovered.
      - smtddr 13y ago
        http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1a51xx/now_that_its_over_the_blockchain_fork_explained/ http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1a51xx/now_that_its... That was caught very quickly and due to a software bug instead of a 51% attack, which is the impression that I'm getting concerning Auroracoin's current problem.
  - gionn 13y ago
    It's usually recoverable by patching the wallet software, so that it recognize the block that caused a fork as an invalid one, so it will be skipped and not taken as the good one.
  - sp332 13y ago
    This is an active attack by someone with a huge amount of mining power. Those were software bugs that miners were able to coordinate fixes for.
    - runn1ng 13y ago
      It's actually not. It was a planned hard fork, just a lot of people (including pools and exchanges) did not update. It's going to cause a big mess.
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
smtddr 13y ago
Think of it this way, you create a bunch of purple 20 dollar bills and convince most(51%) of the population that your purple bills are the only legit ones. So people begin transactions with only the purple bills and green bills are worthless outside their little town(subnet)... but then someone else splits up these people again and convinces 51% that red bills are the only legit one. So now we have this mess where transactions and various business deals were made with green, purple and red bills and everyone is arguing about which color to accept. There's no sensible way to resolve this without nearly two-thirds of people being screwed... so you need to wipe everything out and start from the beginning. Which is lost resources for almost everyone. So there's no good ending. Any solution to this will cause over 50% of Auroracoin-holders to lose everything.... this is absolute worse-case doomsday scenario, assuming someone did a 51% attack with their own blockchain that may or may not be based on the original. If it's a fork of original, those who didn't trade and have their coins in offline wallets will be on all forks.
- skybrian 13y ago
  That's an exaggeration. People who haven't traded since the fork haven't lost anything. If it's caught quickly and resolved, only some of the people who did trade since the fork lost something. An obvious workaround would be for the major exchanges to make sure they're on the same fork and stop all trades if anything goes wrong, until it can be fixed. Of course, the secondary effects from loss of reputation are a big problem.
  - smtddr 13y ago
    So, there are some caveats here. >>People who haven't traded since the fork haven't lost anything. If it's caught quickly and resolved, only some of the people who did trade since the fork lost something. T̶h̶e̶ ̶p̶e̶o̶p̶l̶e̶ ̶w̶h̶o̶ ̶h̶a̶v̶e̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶t̶r̶a̶d̶e̶d̶ ̶s̶i̶n̶c̶e̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶w̶o̶n̶'̶t̶ ̶l̶o̶s̶e̶ ̶a̶n̶y̶t̶h̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶_̶I̶F̶_̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶f̶o̶r̶k̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶i̶r̶ ̶c̶o̶i̶n̶s̶ ̶a̶r̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶ ̶i̶s̶ ̶t̶h̶e̶ ̶o̶n̶e̶ ̶c̶h̶o̶s̶e̶n̶ ̶a̶s̶ ̶l̶e̶g̶i̶t̶. Also, the people who keep coins in exchanges(against advise to do otherwise), if the exchange is operating on a losing fork... all costumers are kinda screwed. But you're right that if action is swift enough and some authorative-group of people can say "use this fork and ignore the other two", then minimal damage will be done. If this is not dealt with early enough.... ever second that goes by all kinds of transactions are taking place and if all major exchanges are not on the same fork, the exchanges running on a losing fork(and all its costumers) are in for some bad times. My guess is they'll probably have to pick the fork that has the most exchanges running on it. Or, if what I've read is correct and Auroracoin is premined... then those premined coins must be rescued. We'll see in the days to come what ends up happening... EDIT: To those who replied below me, you're right. If you haven't traded your coins are on all forks.
gionn 13y ago
For every new fork, is like that you have doubled the money in your wallet. Unfortunately, if you pay with the same money two different people, those two people can't trade that money together because they looks the same. And so you are splitting users that can exchange money in small groups, over and over again.

rsync 13y ago

I read a bit through the forum discussion and the part I find fascinating is that new cryptocurrencies, with low hash rates, are seen as targets ... and that there are high-hash-capability persons and organizations that will attempt to "break the bank" so to speak ... Which leads me to conclude that any new cryptocurrency would need to be launched by an organization that had the computing power to defend the currency (assuming it follows resource-intensive mining paradigms like bitcoin et. al) Can anyone comment on this interpretation ?

sigil 13y ago
Shouldn't the takeover risk be priced into a new cryptocurrency? If coin price > mining cost / 2, it becomes worth it to acquire 51% of mining capability so you can vote the other 49% to yourself, no? But then again, once you have 51% control and everyone knows it, the value of those coins quickly goes to zero. As is probably happening with Auroracoin as we speak.
- wmf 13y ago
  In other words, the price of any new cryptocurrency (that uses an existing algorithm) should be zero, since a 51% attack is nearly certain.
  - sigil 13y ago
    Well not zero, just below half the mining costs, right? As long as it's below that, you still lose more taking over the new cryptocurrency than you gain. And that's also not taking the price drop post-takeover into account, which affects how much the attacker could actually cash out. But yeah, it would seem that miners of new cryptocurrencies should expect to lose money initially.
    - rblatz 13y ago
      That is ignoring people who do it for the lulz or to prevent competing coins from popping up.
  - 13y ago

deleted 13y ago

[deleted]

gionn 13y ago
This was the first most well known :P
- deleted 13y ago
  [deleted]
  - solve 13y ago
    Nearly every coin, Bitcoin included, has had forks in it's early days. You guys should all be ashamed for being so gullible.
    - deleted 13y ago
      [deleted]
      - solve 13y ago
        No, Bitcoin and its successors are made to handle this exact scenario from the beginning. It's common on every coin. There would be no cryptocoins left today if they weren't made to survive this. Don't call me mate. Why do you think coins like Bitcoin require you to wait an extremely long time for "confirmations"? Why is an arbitrary number of "confirmations" chosen as "probably good enough"? This is exactly why. Forks can happen constantly. These coins are eventually-consistent by design.
        deleted 13y ago
        [deleted]

solve 13y ago

Linkbait garbage. I don't like AUR much either, but this title is linkbait garbage.

buryat 13y ago

Everybody knew that it's going to die, no surprise. Though I'm not disappointed: I made over 20000% on AUR.

tptacek 13y ago
This casually written comment sums up most of what I think of cryptocurrencies in general.
- compare 13y ago
  What I love about cryptocoins is that so many "book smart" people hate them. Bringing up the topic is an awesome way to find out who's stubborn and closed minded. Lately I've been using this topic as my "VC test" to decide what VCs I want to work with in my company's next round of investment, and my startup has nothing at all to do with cryptocoins :-)
  - tptacek 13y ago
    My comment was subtle perhaps to the point of being cryptic, but there was actual logic to it. Even if I was a believer in cryptocurrency, the comment I responded to was problematic. Your comment, on the other hand, simply asserts that anyone who hates cryptocurrencies is "stubborn and closed minded". That might be true, but for such an inflammatory argument, you probably want some evidence to support it. Good luck with A16Z. :)
    - compare 13y ago
      So there's logic behind the emotion, eh? :) Something eliminates the unknown and just leaves clear facts and logic? Yes, this is perfectly what I mean. I'm most impressed by the very smart man who is able to say "I just don't know". Book smart people you'll meet will usually reduce their world down to just 2 options: good or bad, will succeed or will fail. Where's the 3rd option? -- unknown, unknowable, we will see, no emotions because I just don't know. Admittedly, for most of my life I was never able to find a reason to believe that this 3rd option is a real thing. I always felt that "unknown" is just a temporary placeholder and that the answer is always really there, somewhere, if you're smart enough to see it. Never in all of my schooling was "unknowable and there's nothing we can do to find out" a legitimate answer. Well, I'm not telling anyone how to think. I'm just fascinated that some people think in these 2 modes, and some in 3.

chm 13y ago

I am disappointed by you guys. No proof was given anywhere. This is just scaremongering. No matter who BitcoinEXpress is, he didn't give proof. This was a planned hard fork, as you can see on the Auroracoin forums[1]. The fork was planned on block 5400, which happened today[2]. [1] http://forum.auroracoin.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=129 http://forum.auroracoin.org/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=129 [2] http://blockexplorer.auroracoin.eu/block/74546cee7f93595d36a4fb0f4fe62739ca5bced85eb4e368e4c6fee960e73476 http://blockexplorer.auroracoin.eu/block/74546cee7f93595d36a...

deleted 13y ago
[deleted]
mc_hammer 13y ago
possibility it was a scam, the original post says you should sell before it crashes, someone could pick them up cheaper if the post caused a big sell-off (not even sure if u can buy aur idk anything about it)
gus_massa 13y ago
I was looking for more information, but I can’t find a site that has a visualization of the forks in the blockchain. Something like this, but with real numbers and more information: http://imgur.com/WNmNtaH http://imgur.com/WNmNtaH Is there a visual representation available?
- chm 13y ago
  Not that I know of, but you'd be welcome to make an app out of this! I'm not sure it would be very profitable, but it definitely would be helpful :)
LoganCale 13y ago
Planned hard forks aren't especially uncommon, either. Dogecoin recently went through one.
nailer 13y ago
So... there's now two 'ledgers' of Aurororacoin? I get PKI and P2P but cryptocurrency is new to me. Why would you ever want to fork a ledger/blockchain?

e3pi 13y ago

coinmarketcap.com charts over 190 altcoins. 30 day chart: http://coinmarketcap.com/aur_30.html http://coinmarketcap.com/aur_30.html 7 day chart: http://coinmarketcap.com/aur_7.html http://coinmarketcap.com/aur_7.html

gus_massa 13y ago
Yes, it’s sinking, but this drop is caused by another problem. The pessimistic interpretation says that this is caused by a pump and dump scheme. The optimistic interpretation says that Auroracoin was heavily (50%) premined. The premined coins were stored and the amount was approximately 100x the amount of the new coins. In the last 4 days they started to distribute the premined coins to the Islanders. So the amount of circulation coins increased heavily, and the price dropped. It’s like inflation. I don’t have the actual numbers, but I think that the distribution of the coins was unsuccessful. If it were successful the price would have fallen even more.

gojomo 13y ago

Forum threads have announced 47 of the last 2 altcoin fatalities.

piratebroadcast 13y ago

Someone explain like I'm 5?

ing33k 13y ago

dogecoin faced some issues like this, but community is strong and people promptly update their clients when announced .

olalonde 13y ago

This is "just" a scheduled hard fork that went bad. The developers made a backwards incompatible change to the protocol and presumably, a sizable part of the network forgot or refused to update their client. While altcoins are more vulnerable to 51% attacks, 51% attacks do not result in hard forks. Hard forks can only happen when two or more incompatible clients are simultaneously used by the network participants. 51% attacks are easier to pull off during hard forks because the network's hashing rate is essentially split between the chains but there is no evidence that such an attack has occurred.

vsayer 13y ago

It's FUD guys. Scare tactics to make you dump your coins so scammers can buy low. Just please be sure to update your wallets.

victormx 13y ago

Just FUD, it's a hard fork, bitcoin has passed for this situations

runn1ng 13y ago

phpBB threads are so painful to read.

User54 13y ago

It was just one person who stated there was multiple forks, it was several posting on Reddit and Bitcointalk. A few them are developers. The hash rate jumped instantly from 1.6 GBS to more than 50gbs in a matter of a minute or two. There were clearly multiple forks for a time.