6 ms·
I downvoted you because - while you raise a generally valid concern - your statement is exaggerated to a degree that makes it grossly misleading. You say: > wh
by Hermel 11y ago
I downvoted you because - while you raise a generally valid concern - your statement is exaggerated to a degree that makes it grossly misleading. You say:
> which means that they could make arbitrary changes to the blockchain
This makes it sound like the 51% attacker could make arbitrary changes to the ledger, thereby stealing arbitrary shares. That is not the case. For example, such an attacker cannot forge any signatures and thus cannot manipulate transactions. All the attacker can do is censor new transactions or slowly unroll past transactions. In case of 51% of the computing power, unrolling could happen at a speed of (51% - 49%) = 2% of time, i.e. if the attack lasts for 50 days, the attacker could unroll one day worth of transactions. What makes the unrolling problematic, is that it enables the attacker to double-spend. One potential measure for NASDAQ to prevent this is to demand known signatures to be used for transactions (i.e. whenever you transfer shares, you must use a signature you previously registered with NASDAQ). With colored coins, the issuer can enforce such restrictions by refusing to redeem shares that were not properly obtained. So even in case of such an attack, NASDAQ could identify the attacker (or the person collaborating with the attacker in order to attempt a double-spend) and initiate legal measures (i.e. sue the attacker for damages).
- jedberg 11y ago> I downvoted you because - while you raise a generally valid concern - your statement is exaggerated to a degree that makes it grossly misleading Ok, that's fair, however, I specifically said "whether that is true or not" because I didn't know, I was just repeating the article, which is clearly wrong.
- jahnu 11y agoIn reference to the voting I'd like to suggest you abandon this strategy of down-voting because it's bad information and instead reply in an informative way like you just did because in this case I and other people learned something through discussion which I otherwise would not have.
- bennofs 11y agoDoesn't a technique like selfish mining (http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243 http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243) mean that you can undo past transactions faster than 2% of the time, though?
- ricardobeat 11y agoYour point is valid but not a reason to downvote - on HN downvotes are supposed to weed out aggression, trolling and other unwanted behaviours, not to express disagreement.
- Flimm 11y agoSadly, that's not the case, according to Paul Graham: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=117171
- astrobe_ 11y agoFortunately that was ~8 years ago. I think the current interpretation is upvote="thank you", downvote="less than uninteresting".
- philbarr 11y agoThat's what the interpretation should be. But because of a comment Paul Graham wrote ~8 years ago, people think they can downvote just if they disagree. Anyway, we're not allowed to talk about downvoting because it's against the rules. It's the great HN Catch 22.
- maxerickson 11y agoThe pretext of the discussion of what sorts of downvotes are okay is that someone is watching and is going to do something about it. That seems like it might happen in egregious cases, but I'm not sure why people think someone is going to spend a couple of minutes analyzing whether the 4 down clicks on their tossaway comment were fair minded (whatever that means) or not. So the problem isn't just that it's a boring discussion, it's also just not a reasonable expectation that every single click be fair (whatever that means).
- loceng 11y agoHow do you know who the attacked is to then be able to sue them?
- vtlynch 11y agoBitcoin isnt anonymous, so you could potentially figure it out.
- loceng 11y agoI work in a co-working space and I see random people coming in to use the Bitcoin ATM here - there's no requirement for identification before putting their cash in and getting Bitcoin in return. How isn't that anonymous?