Man Behind Week-Long Bitcoin Attacks Reveals Himself 71
An anonymous reader writes: A Russian man that calls himself "Alister Maclin" has been disrupting the Bitcoin network for over a week, creating duplicate transactions, and annoying users. According to Bitcoin experts, the attack was not dangerous and is the equivalent of "spam" on the Bitcoin blockchain servers, known in the industry as a "malleability attack," creating duplicate transactions, but not affecting Bitcoin funds. Maclin recently gave an interview to Vice.
What doesn't kill bitcoin will make it stronger (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re: What doesn't kill bitcoin will make it stronge (Score:2)
Viva Chavez and his minion!
Re:has lost 75 percent of its value in the last 22 (Score:3)
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Sure if you're a bond villian or international drug trafficker.
Or a bond villian who moonlights as an international drug trafficker.
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In 22 months, sure.
In 2011 it was $5.80 a coin and today it is $245.00 a coin.
It is all a matter of perspective.
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In 2011 it was $5.80 a coin and today it is $245.00 a coin.
It was up to 600, 700 and more at the time of the hype. Wish I'd sold back then. Long-term trend seems downwards.
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I dont agree. It was in the mid 200's (235-240) before the hype and big jump in price. It reached a high dollar amount, which is way above the valuation that bitcoin could sustain. After which it has corrected back down to the mid 200's and has held there for the last year.
I would say that the long term trend is flat with a slow rise, I also expect to see another large spike when and if the hype picks back up.
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I sure hope for another spike, I still own a few BC. But yes, it's not an alarming trend, no race to the bottom, I didn't mean to say that it goes to zero. But from what I see in the yearly stats I check now and then, it seems slightly downward.
And then before (Score:3)
Yeah, so far so good as long as you don't mind that BitCoin has lost 75 percent of its value in the last 22 months.
And before it has gained 400% in a few months, and before...
Seems that "a roomful of pigeons picking furiosly with their beaks at numpads" is the best approximation of BTCs value over time.
There would be riots if that was happening in a real currency market.
Such a thing in a real currency market would require everyone involved being on high doses of LSD.
More seriously:
- BTCs as a longterm storage currency isn't that much useful (unless you're a big gambler). Just don't store any longterm savings into this.
- bitcoin, the protocol, with all the technologies involved (blockchai
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Bitcoin has been around for six years. When does it stop bean able to use the "it's an experimental currency" excuse?
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Not in the slightest. [litecoin.org]
In fact that comment is somewhat embarrasing. [wikipedia.org]
Re:What doesn't kill bitcoin will make it stronger (Score:4, Insightful)
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Fiat currencIES maybe? Proofreading before post is a necessary skill.
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What are you basing your "100 years" on? The US dollar went fiat curency in 1971. What fiat currencies lasted about 100 years?
BTC vs bitcoin (Score:3)
I guess 20-30 years would be enough to prove that it' a viable currency in the long term.
even if BTC as a currency never gets any useful due to exchange rate instabilities,
bitcoin the protocole is already extremely useful.
(absence of a central authority being instead distributed across the whole network, and thus freedom to chose any provider for both ends (customer and merchant) of a transaction - both don't need to have accounts at PayPal, or at the Visa / MasterCard duopoly, etc.)
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I guess 20-30 years would be enough to prove that it' a viable currency in the long term.
even if BTC as a currency never gets any useful due to exchange rate instabilities, bitcoin the protocole is already extremely useful. (absence of a central authority being instead distributed across the whole network, and thus freedom to chose any provider for both ends (customer and merchant) of a transaction - both don't need to have accounts at PayPal, or at the Visa / MasterCard duopoly, etc.)
Exactly. Currency, to be viable, must be a reliable store of value. Large swings in value negate that, even as it makes it a useful speculative investment. The protocol is useful for what it provides, but that can be replicated by any number of currencies should someone want to so do. As long as there is a way to immediately convert BitCoin to real money you'll be able to buy things with it; if only because all it is acting as is an intermediary to facilitate the transaction and thus unlikely to see any si
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Bean?
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He was just one guy. Wait until there are a million zombie PCs doing the same thing for a week. Lets see how well the blockchain copes then.
Hacker? (Score:1)
So the guy runs some stress testing tool against bitcoin machines/network and that makes him a hacker? That's quite a hyperbole.
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No, that's why neither the summary nor the article use the term. You got butthurt out of something you imagined out of thin air.
Mid 90's I thought feeding Gibson super computer (Score:2)
cookies was hacking, now this sheesh.
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This isn't even coherent. What?
The system isn't very good (Score:1)
It is important that transactions not go through any kind of centralized system, but this sort of attack shows that you can't simply make the entire network a virtual centralized system. We need a replacement system that eliminates the need for a single physical or virtual store.
Re:The system isn't very good (Score:4, Insightful)
Why? You realize this sort of attack was entirely expected, and that the system is engineered to withstand it, and did, trivially?
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Expected, yes. Engineered to withstand - no. Bitcoin Core nodes accept as many transactions as they can with no memory limit until eventually they bloat up so much the operating system kills them. The official "solution" for this is to babysit your node and if you see it running out of memory, change a command line flag to make it ignore any transactions with lower than the given fee
Re:TRIGGERED (Score:4, Insightful)
No, because he didn't disrupt the network. He just spammed the blockchain a bit. No transactions were forged, interrupted, or otherwise fucked with. Just a few extra megs to store the full blockchain for those running full nodes.
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lets see if we can get the chain up to 1TB
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Then how is it now(*) 40 GB-ish? I doubt bitcoin dates back to 1200 A.D.
(*) last time i checked
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Not even that. With TX malleability, extra transactions are broadcast around the network, but only 1 is actually stored in the blockchain. He didn't add a single byte to the blockchain that wasn't already going to be there.
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Not a currency (Score:1)
Of course he's Russian, so it doesn't really matter. At least it doesn't matter until he manages to screw up some buddy's of Putin, and then "legal repercussions" will be the least of his worries.
BTC (currency/commodity) vs bitcoin (protocol) (Score:3)
bitcoin is also a network protocol (designed to shift around values using blockchain technology).
TFA's attacks are mainly attacks on the protocol. (i.e.: he didn't try to steal BTCs currency/commodity, he tried to wreak havoc the blockchain. The bitcoin network handled that quite well).
why is this news? (Score:3)
Bitcoin is designed to make it very difficult to successfully get fake transactions into the accepted blockchain except on a very short and soon corrected basis - even if you had huge amounts of hashing power which this individual did not. An entire week of lame attempts? Boring.
bitcoin (protocol) vs BTC (currency) (Score:2)
Bitcoin is designed to make it very difficult to successfully get fake transactions into the accepted blockchain except on a very short and soon corrected basis - even if you had huge amounts of hashing power which this individual did not. An entire week of lame attempts? Boring.
Which is exycatly why bitcoin, the piece of software and its protocol, together with the underlying blockchain technology, are very useful *as of today*, despite the fact that BTC currency seems to have a complete random value.
I know this guy! (Score:1)
"Alister Maclin"? I love his books! "The Gums of Navarone", "Ice Station Zorba" and who can forget "Where Beagles Dare"?