Researchers Locate Flaw In Bitcoin Protocol 191
An anonymous reader writes "Researchers at Microsoft Research and Cornell identified a potential flaw in Bitcoin's transaction propagation. In a recent paper they show how miner nodes in the Bitcoin network have an incentive not to relay transactions to the rest of the network, and propose to implement a scheme that rewards nodes [PDF] for relaying messages."
I'm starting to want to work at Microsoft Research (Score:3, Insightful)
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Well, IBM do have a fairly large research division too.
Re:I'm starting to want to work at Microsoft Resea (Score:4, Interesting)
Google as well. Saw an interesting article on Google X labs, their "skunkworks"-style division yesterday.
http://www.slashgear.com/google-x-labs-plans-robot-researchers-to-map-the-future-14194990/ [slashgear.com]
There's a link to the poorly-paywalled nytimes article in there. Funny thing is they like to keep the fact that they're doing research a secret and constantly emphasize that they put very little money into research, because research makes shareholders nervous. Shows you how far ahead shareholders (or their HFT servers) are thinking.
Re:I'm starting to want to work at Microsoft Resea (Score:4, Informative)
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I wish the coffee were free, tho. Google does that right.
You have just broken my SmugAnnoyingGitOmeter.
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Fairly large? Second only to Microsoft. And it's one of the best places you could work at.
IBM spends really a large amount of money on R&D. I wish the coffee were free, tho. Google does that right.
How can they expect to do R&D if the coffee's not free?
I'm serious!
Re:I'm starting to want to work at Microsoft Resea (Score:5, Funny)
You're the guy that said he worked in marketing yesterday. Why is it that all UIDs over 2,000,000 seem to do marketing for MS?
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I think the real question here is why all UIDs under 2,000,000 don't do marketing for MS. But seriously, their R&D department do some pretty cool stuff. Even though MS manage to churn out nine-nines of crap products, occasionally they still come out with something awesome that they manage to get to market (think Kinect). Shame they spend the rest of their time suing their competitors, churning out garbage like Windows and spreading FUD.
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But seriously, their R&D department do some pretty cool stuff. Even though MS manage to churn out nine-nines of crap products, occasionally they still come out with something awesome that they manage to get to market (think Kinect).
The problem with that idea is that Kinect was a 90%+ finished product when they bought it. They polished it for use with the 360, it always takes them some time to fuck up a new technology sufficiently for their branding, and kicked it out the door. And it's taking them how long to kick out a PC version even though hobbyists have been doing it all along? Microsoft is pathetic at everything but illegally exploiting their opportunities and believing otherwise is ignorant at best.
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But seriously, their R&D department do some pretty cool stuff. Even though MS manage to churn out nine-nines of crap products, occasionally they still come out with something awesome that they manage to get to market (think Kinect).
The problem with that idea is that Kinect was a 90%+ finished product when they bought it.
That's strange, isn't this EXACTLY the sort of thing people praise Apple for? I mean hell, two weeks ago that's exactly what I heard journalists waxing poetic about with Steve Jobs.
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The problem with that idea is that Kinect was a 90%+ finished product when they bought it.
That's strange, isn't this EXACTLY the sort of thing people praise Apple for? I mean hell, two weeks ago that's exactly what I heard journalists waxing poetic about with Steve Jobs.
People who aren't me. Check my posting history, I got plenty of downmods right after Jobs died for saying the things that RMS eventually said about Jobs (I don't believe in "too soon" or "sacred") and then I got more for supporting RMS' article. Luckily I got more up than down. That doesn't mean that the groupthink agrees with me, but it does suggest that the groupthink is not as aligned as you seem to think it is.
Re:I'm starting to want to work at Microsoft Resea (Score:4, Insightful)
Problem is, the final 10% polishing is actually pretty damn hard. If you've done software development, getting to the point where the basic features work is really quick. But getting to the point where it's releasable and usable takes a lot of effort.
It's one thing that Apple is known for (most innovations that are "cool" are at the 90% stage, but it still takes a ton of effort to get it to the stage where people other than geeks and engineers can USE it).
For Kinect, the final 10% would involve packaging (how does Kinect look, and will it fit with the rest of the equipment?), fitting the stuff inside the package (does it fit? Does the enclosure need redesign?), and more importantly, manufacturability.
Sticking a reference design in a box is not easy. A lot of work is required in order to be able to build in huge volumes - are the parts available in quantity (and cheaply)? Can it be assembled easily or are there fiddly calibration bits that'll take time to work? Are there simple pass/fail criterion?
It takes a lot of work. For open-source, you can abandon it after the 90% point (and most stuff is - the final work is the boring dull stuff no one wants to do), but it's not going to fly for commercial products that you want people to buy. And they know when a product was skimped on.
Heck, even the UI of a product is important, and Kinect took some beating there.
(It's why you get reviews on "solidness" - a minor detail but relates to build quality, ditto with use of "cheap plastic" or worse yet, "cheap feeling plastic".) It's that final 10% that Apple is well reknown for, and if it was easy, well, Apple would be dead and there would be tons of products with well designed UIs and very nice casings and such.
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For Kinect, the final 10% would involve packaging (how does Kinect look, and will it fit with the rest of the equipment?)
which is subjective; I think it looks lame, but that's my own personal opinion.
fitting the stuff inside the package (does it fit? Does the enclosure need redesign?),
They made the package for the camera. Srsly?
and more importantly, manufacturability.
Which is the kind of thing that Microsoft has proven themselves to be bad at time and again with flaky hardware. Unless that's just planned obsolescence, in which case they have merely proven themselves to be bastards time and again, which we knew anyway.
Heck, even the UI of a product is important, and Kinect took some beating there.
IOW, they failed.
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do marketing for MS. But seriously, their R&D department do some pretty cool stuff. Even though MS manage to churn out nine-nines of crap products, occasionally they still come out with something awesome that they manage to get to market (think Kinect).
On other occasions they just patent it so that nobody else will
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This;
The stability of the current desktop computer market is so important to Microsoft that they will practically never actually innovate. They have an R&D department for two reasons. 1) To keep the ideas away from other companies by patenting them and then not licensing them onward 2) To keep the good people away from other companies by using them to create patents.
The reason not to work for Microsoft R&D is that, whilst you will be comfortable, well fed and well off, you will lead an empty
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The reason not to work for Microsoft R&D is that, whilst you will be comfortable, well fed and well off, you will lead an empty life and they will suck your soul out of you.
Isn't that pretty much how employment in general works?
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For some employers more so than for others, I feel :)
The GP/GGP's comments seem about right to me. I always did wonder how MS Research could do so much cool stuff, and yet have so little of it make it to market with any of the coolness still attached.
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I got bored of the Wii gimmick and PS Move pretty quick. So I didn't even bother buying Kinect for my 360. How is it any better? I'm not interested in dancing games, and while I used to fantasize about full body motion fighting games as a teenager, I know now that doing that doing that type of violent motion without any resistance (ie a punching bag or opponent) is pretty bad for your joints in the long run.
MS do manage to hit on good ideas every now and then, and it's good that they have a research lab. Th
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My biggest problem with Kinect is that it is apparently impossible to create a decent golf game with it.
Apparently, it can't read what you're doing with your wrists ... unless they made it so you were holding a controller.
I was really hoping for a decent golf game. :-P
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So due to the nature and limitations of the device it has sunk almost immediately into a morass of shovelware with dance & fitness games massively over represented and others which have throwaway mini games
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The main buzz for the tech appears to be from hackers who discovered you can do some neat things with a camera with some depth finding capabilities.
And Microsoft actually responded to that a lot differently than Sony or Nintendo - They're bringing Kinect support to PC as well, and have released API's to use it.
Re:I'm starting to want to work at Microsoft Resea (Score:4, Interesting)
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The Wii control works on PC out of the factory, no need for anything fancy, except for bluetooth. People just don't use it a lot (except, maybe, on media centers) because it doesn't make much sense.
Microsoft is on a different situation, because the kinetic would be usefull on a PC (for some really targeted applications), and because it prohibited people from using it that way. Now you are trying to make MS backtracking from that prohibition sound as if it was making some incredible innovation. That simply i
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Well, untill we have direct neural interfaces, any game input system will be (and currently is) a limited kind of toy. Old directional plus buttons joystic leads to 2D interaction, even when the game tries to create a 3D environment, stearing wells and pistol lead to car and shooting games, respectively, the Wii control restrics the games to very coarse movements, and so on.
In the end, it is ok that the kinetic is a false movement plataform. It happens to be quite fun, at least sporadicaly (I don't own one)
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Re:I'm starting to want to work at Microsoft Resea (Score:4, Interesting)
I got bored of the Wii gimmick and PS Move pretty quick. So I didn't even bother buying Kinect for my 360. How is it any better?
It's not. All three non-haptic (don't give me that "vibration is feedback" claptrap!) motion gaming controllers are absolutely horrible to use.
However, the Kinect is an amazing machine vision system. SLAM, 3d scanning, etc, all for something the size of a Toblerone you can buy off-the-shelf for cheap.
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The PS Move is clearly a knockoff of the Wiimote, and there's no way you can say it isn't.
I wouldn't try to say that it isn't. It's a knockoff that improves a lot on the original though. I haven't tried Wii motion plus though so I can't say how that compares. I only used my Move with the demos it came with though - I haven't seen any games come out that I'd actually want to play with it. If a good game came out for Kinect or any other future control system, then I'd buy it of course. But they're all just gimmicky garbage so far. It's a shame that Rock Band and Guitar Hero were so overdone, I'd r
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I think the real question here is why all UIDs under 2,000,000 don't do marketing for MS.
Stupid question. We're too old.
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I think the real question here is why all UIDs under 2,000,000 don't do marketing for MS.
Authenticity.
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Not sure what planet you're living on.. Apple has become a second evil empire which may make MS seem slightly more reasonable in some cases - but MS is still obviously an evil empire in itself. As soon as their anti-trust oversight was up earlier this year, it was straight back to the BS. I feel dirty even thinking about looking at an MS product like .NET.
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the general hate towards Microsoft and their success with Windows.
Um. The hate has never been about success. The hate has been due to the monopoly position of an inferior product. Now I know you're just a marketing droid and therefore probably have no idea nor experience of the technical history during the 80s and 90s, and maybe even the 00s, but there are logical reasons for all the hate.
Windows has been getting better over the years, but those of us who experienced some of the alternatives tend to feel like MS's monopoly has held the advancement of desktop software back
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Just telling it how I see it.
1-1000: godlike
1001-5000: clever cookies
5000-50000: smart, run their own business
50001-100000: like to drink beer, married to beautiful, genius female geeks
100001-900000: generally insightful and interesting. Occasional troll.
900001-1000000: overly opinionated, often wrong
1000001-1500000: can't spell
1500001-2000000: really can't spell. "Lol" a lot. Point out the bleeding obvious in every comment.
2000001+ : work for advertising agencies, contracted out to MS and Facebook.
666: str
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Like IBM have had for years you mean ....IBM is a small company that produces software and some other stuff ...
It's research department is quite well known ... five Nobel Prizes, four Turing Awards, nine National Medals of Technology, and five National Medals of Science.
Courier Tablet - sorry no-one seems to have heard of it, is that anything like the iPad or the Galaxy Tablet ?
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it's actually the only major company in the industry that does have such research center. I wish I worked there :-P
Google X might be larger, if anyone knew where it was....
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Yeah and that's great and all, if you just want to crap out useless prototypes that never actually go anywhere(the BitCoin research is pretty cool though)... heaven forbid you have an idea that threatens Office, Windows or the Xbox divisions.
Life at Microsoft R&D must be some bizarre sisyphean effort that's somehow rewarding when you *almost* get that boulder up the hill.
Yes but (Score:4, Funny)
It still sounds like a better system than our current financial institutions.
Re:Yes but (Score:5, Insightful)
As someone said before, Bitcoin would be a lot more valuable if your currency held the promise of something. For example selling your computer time makes much more sense than doing calculations designed to waste computing power. I've wondered before if there was anything to Bitcoin, but I really can't think of it as a currency. I think of it more like the stock market, and how I can abuse it to make a profit. In the end I'm better off just making money doing real work.
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As someone said before, Bitcoin would be a lot more valuable if your currency held the promise of something. For example selling your computer time makes much more sense than doing calculations designed to waste computing power. I've wondered before if there was anything to Bitcoin, but I really can't think of it as a currency. I think of it more like the stock market, and how I can abuse it to make a profit. In the end I'm better off just making money doing real work.
Unfortunately in this world doing real work is the one thing that will guarantee that you only get a commodity level of pay. That's why stockbrokers and lawyers make more than programmers or mechanics
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Unfortunately in this world doing real work is the one thing that will guarantee that you only get a commodity level of pay. That's why stockbrokers and lawyers make more than programmers or mechanics
It's all based on supply and demand. Frankly, mechanics and programmers are quite common place jobs. Good stockbrokers and lawyers, not so much. And I'm a programmer myself, but I understand the position rather than just going "lalala".
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It's all based on supply and demand.
Bullshit. Stockbrokers and lawyers are licensed and subsidized. The supply is artificially limited by government fiat, and demand is artificially increased. Not so for mechanics and programmers. And that's the reason for the difference. It has nothing to do with natural supply and demand.
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Prosperity: the gift of stockbrokers and lawyers to the rest of us.
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Prosperity: the gift of stockbrokers and lawyers to the rest of us.
Maybe at one time that had some truth to it. Lately they've been keeping that gift for themselves.
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Bullshit. Stockbrokers and lawyers are licensed and subsidized. The supply is artificially limited by government fiat, and demand is artificially increased. Not so for mechanics and programmers. And that's the reason for the difference. It has nothing to do with natural supply and demand.
Artificially limited by fiat? This suggests there is a quota for how many lawyers can be licensed in a given year. I am unaware of such a limit. Having to pass an examination is not the same thing.
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Not to defend BT, but just because it does not represent something specific does not make it so different form other currencies.
You might just as well say
Dollars would be a lot more valuable if your currency held the promise of something. For example selling shares in the nations store of gold makes much more sense than doing massive printing for the sake of wasting cotton, wood fiber and ink. I've wondered before if there was anything to Dollars, but I really can't think of them as a currency.
Yes I realize that one *value* aspect of the dollar is it can satisfy tax obligations but even that is pretty artificial construct.
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I'm aware of that, but the dollar has evolved such that it does hold the promise of value, because it's already accepted all over. You can't just get BitCoin accepted by saying it "should" be accepted. I'd rather have something like Zynga credits or WoW than a bitcoin, despite not wanting to play WoW or any Zynga games. At least those currencies have some kind of possible use for millions of people.
Re:Yes but (Score:5, Insightful)
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The value of things like gold, silver, gems etc don't come around purely from their scarcity though. They're just beautiful in their own right, which combined with being scarce, makes them valuable in our psyche.
I guess the point I'm trying to rationalise is that the currency needs to be desirable (which isn't a particularly rational quality). BitCoin is not desirable. The desirability can also come from rational factors like being able to use the currency, but it's a chicken and egg situation. BitCoin woul
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...I really can't think of it as a currency. I think of it more like the stock market...
What it actually works the best at is a replacement for intermediaries. The intermediaries are very pissed off about this, BTW.
When I bought a Debian themed (engraved) swiss army knife some weeks ago, I had to transfer money from my CC in USD to paypal in USD at some loss to the parasites. Then from paypal in USD to this european online IBAN provider in EUR at some loss to the parasites, both transactionally and currency conversion loss. Then from the IBAN provider in EUR to the swiss Debian club in CHR
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Wow, and to think that I've sent money all over the world with none of that nonsense and fees in the sub-1% range.
Direct bank transfers, look 'em up maybe?
I agree the middlemen and many banks are parasites, but you seem to have gone out of your way to do that transaction completely wrong.
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CH: Confederation Helvetique. F: Franc. No idea why the abbreviation was based on French, instead of German, Italian or old Swiss.
Re:Yes but (Score:4, Informative)
stability comes from the size of userbase. More users = greater inertia.
Either way central banks have no problem with playing dirty. Imagine having tons of swiss francs and losing 8% in a matter of seconds as it happened early September when they announced pegging to euro.
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BitCoin is a proof of concept, not a currency.
Re:Yes but (Score:5, Insightful)
It's currency in the sense that pinto beans are a currency.
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There are over 30 [bitcoin.it] currency exchanges that trade in Bitcoins. So that's simply false.
Wow there's more currency exchanges for Bitcoins than merchants that accept them!
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The problem with bitcoin from my point of view is that it's too damn easy to steal.
At least with cold hard cash you have to be pickpocketed or burglarized before you lose it. With bitcoin all you need is some two bit hacker taking advantage of a technophobe running a jacked computer and bam, all his bitcoins are belong to the haxxors.
All it takes is one rogue hacker to misdirect bitcoin payments and you have instant skimming.
And since it competes with government control, civil authorities won't investigate
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But just as you put your savings in a bank, you can put your bitcoins in another account. Extract from https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet [bitcoin.it]
"A good practice is to keep at least two wallets, one as a "current account" for everyday transactions and one as a "savings account" where you store the majority of your Bitcoins.
The "savings account" wallet should be bac
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The "savings account" wallet should be backed up in encrypted form only and all plaintext copies of this wallet should be erased. In case someone gains unauthorised access to your computer (either by physically stealing it or by exploiting a system vulnerability via the internet), they will only be able to spend the coins in your "current account" wallet."
I can't think of any other currency where forgetting the password to your bank account actually causes you to irreversibly lose the money contained therein...
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And your point is? Every kind of wealth storage has its flaws, some of them just as fatal, e.g., storing your wealth as cash and having it stolen.
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You also get instability with fiat currencies, just look at the Zimbabwe Dollar...
Currencies which are centrally controlled can trivially be devalued simply by the controller of that currency printing more money... The more they print, the lower value the remaining currency has.
The only disadvantage bitcoin currently has, is being relatively small so it requires considerably less resources to influence the market as a whole.
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With Bitcoin you can lose 30% of your money overnight.
Think of the Greeks you insensitive clod
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With Bitcoin you can lose all of your money overnight
Fixed.
--
BMO
Irresponisble headline (Score:5, Informative)
Only a small fraction of bitcoin nodes (e.g. 1%) are mining nodes, and they all relay transactions as relaying transactions is very cheap to do. The problem they're describing clearly does not exist. If it did someday turn out to be an issue you can address it by users handing their transactions directly to various miners, you don't need some crazy complicated reward scheme.
It's also not news— their contribution isn't insight on incentives but a complicated sibyl resistant reward scheme for trees (which the bitcoin network is not) which requires doubling the cost of forwarding a transaction every two hops it takes. (By making every node perform a great many additional cryptographic signatures and checks in order to track the reward)
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Only a small fraction of bitcoin nodes (e.g. 1%) are mining nodes, and they all relay transactions as relaying transactions is very cheap to do.
The problem is what happens if relaying transactions becomes less cheap - that is to say, if Bitcoin actually gets adopted and the transaction volume skyrockets.
Re:Not just an "Irresponisble" headline...wrong. (Score:3)
"The flaw pointed out in (this) paper is that there is a negative incentive for miners to forward Bitcoin transactions." This is a big derp on the part of these researchers.
There might be 20 pools collectively mining, and maybe 100+ people mining by themselves at this time. They currently have more processing power than the top 10 supercomputers in the world put together. Miners strengthen the blockchain record of past transactions against cryptographic forgery, but their processing power is not what distr
summary (Score:5, Insightful)
If a LARGE proportion of bitcoin nodes are run by assholes who refuse to distribute transactions then the network may fall apart.
This system seems to add a lot of complexity to solve something that has not proven a problem.
All of my mod points will be undone now, but.. (Score:3, Interesting)
A bug can exist without it immediately causing problems. It's generally best to fix things before they become a problem, not afterwards.
Re:All of my mod points will be undone now, but.. (Score:4, Funny)
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True but equally the cost of a fix must be weighed against the benefit of that fix. This "fix" seems to be high cost (dramatically increasing the cost of forwarding a block) for dubious benefit.
Even if the asshole density got to high for transactions to propogate through random public connections i'm sure people would form other arragenements for getting transactions to miners.
The researchers haven't even made it clear (at least from my reading of the paper, please tell me if I missed something) if they thi
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No, this system adds a lot of complexity to tie every transaction to an IP address. The goal is surveillance, the stated purpose is just a thinly veiled excuse.
Doesn't really make sense (Score:3, Interesting)
This doesn't really make sense. Clients forward transactions as well as miners (and typical clients are connected to 8 other clients, making it a very well connected network).
Granted, there is no incentive to forward transactions, but if nobody forwards transactions then the network won't work so ultimately it's in the self interest of all users to do so. Some miners may decide not to do so, in the hope that they will be the one who solves the block and get the transaction fee. But they are not actually gaining anything by doing so. They are making other miners potentially miss out on transaction fees but it doesn't improve their chances of winning the block and therefore getting the fee and there is no way they can know what transactions other miners have picked up through other routes via the network.
I think the conclusion is wrong; while there is no incentive to forward the transaction (beyond stability of the network), there is also no obvious disincentive to do so as the cost is tiny (the cost of the bandwidth to forward it)
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Re:Doesn't really make sense (Score:4, Informative)
They are making other miners potentially miss out on transaction fees but it doesn't improve their chances of winning the block and therefore getting the fee and there is no way they can know what transactions other miners have picked up through other routes via the network.
If it hurts the other guy and it doesn't hurt you then there is an incentive not to forward any more transactions than you have to. If it hurts you and other guy at the same time then you can do it selectively, any time it will hurt him more. If everyone were altruistic, you'd be right. They aren't, so you aren't.
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It's not about altruism, it's about longer term incentives. If Bitcoin fails to work properly because people hoard transactions then the worth of your own Bitcoin using business and stored value goes down.
There are plenty of other responses possible to this problem though, if it ever actually happens (nobody has observed people failing to relay transactions for profit today). One is to simply have rebroadcast nodes that don't verify transactions or blocks and thus are very cheap to run, which simply ensure
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I didn't say it couldn't be solved, I said there are incentives to behave in this fashion, and therefore it is a flaw in the implementation of bitcoin, but a much smaller one than that bitcoins represent waste instead of production or wealth.
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... than that bitcoins represent waste instead of production or wealth.
I don't understand your point. How do traditional notes/coins represent production and wealth instead of waste. There is no intrinsic value in the notes I currently hold, there is only value in the idea that I can swap it for something else.
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Actually, for various reasons Bitcoin appears to be quite badly connected. Pools have seen block propagation times across the networks of over a minute, and I don't think anyone's even bothered to measure transaction propagation because it doesn't currently matter much to the miners.
I don't like this one bit (Score:2)
So we need some new method or entity to help move bitcoin from one place to another? Perhaps something like.. banks and insurance companies and derivatives etc? I don't like where this is headed :)
Grabbing some popcorn (Score:2, Interesting)
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Ludicrous (Score:3)
The Bitcoin network is well-connected and the only nodes that have incentive not to forward txs make up a tiny percentage of the network (less than 1%). Even if they were the only nodes on the network, the network is designed so that users can locate them, and it costs nothing for a user to forward their transaction to many/all of them. This is completely a non-issue.
Bitcoin has flaws?!? (Score:2)
/sarcasm
The more Bitcoin gets looked at (Score:2)
the more rules and regulations need to be put into place to stop abuse.
Like actual currency.
Re:And what's the Bitcoin Forums response? (Score:5, Insightful)
when you wrote "denial" did you mean "in a discussion involving several dozen people, one participant denied the existence of the problem while everyone else discussed whether the flaw is a practical problem or how it could be solved"?
Understandable typo, the keys are right next to each other.
Re:And what's the Bitcoin Forums response? (Score:4, Informative)
Not to mention "engaging in a constructive discussion with one of the original authors of the paper, who hopped in and thanked people for their interesting comments".
Mod parent up.
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Yeah, hardly denial. Let me post my response to the thread here to make it more visible. The summary is that this is not a new argument, but the MSR researchers certainly went deeper into it than most people do. Long term broadcast/floodfill is likely to become less important for other reasons beyond nodes deciding not to relay (which is not a problem observed in practice).
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I think the best response on there is this:
"I suppose this argument would be equivalent to saying in BitTorrent, that there is "no incentive" for people to seed files, therefore, eventually nobody will seed files and that BitTorrent will soon fail."
As far as I can tell, the argument is this:
1. Miners win transaction fees when they a) receive a transaction, and b) solve a block with that transaction in it.
2. If other miners don't know about a transaction, they cannot win the transaction fee.
3. Miners are the
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See the comments in the thread. In particular, (a) there's a limit to the number of fee-free transactions in a block, and once we start hitting that limit it makes sense for nodes to delay other people's transactions by not forwarding them, and (b) it's possible for miners to incentivise other nodes not to forward transactions with big fees to anyone else.
Re:And what's the Bitcoin Forums response? (Score:5, Funny)
If people stop mining bitcoins now, the people at the top will stop winning, so of course they are going to deny. You know, kind of like global warming
A bad analogy is like a leaky screwdriver and that analogy has covered the floor in so much water that it is like a really tricky crossword puzzle.
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You know, kind of like global warming.
Please don't bring up Global Warming in a Bitcoin thread. Doing that is like crossing the streams in Ghostbusters -- peoples' heads will explode.
Re:Another flaw found in Bitcoin protocol (Score:5, Interesting)
The value of a good is actually whatever a third party is willing to give you in exchange for that good... This value is completely arbitrary, and allows products with no physical value (eg software) to be sold for huge amounts of money or other goods...
Similarly, money itself has no real value, only the value that others are willing to give in exchange for it.
The advantage of bitcoin, is that while its effectively a worthless token system, just like regular cash, it is a finite supply and thus not subject to the whims of a central authority.
Personally i use bitcoin a lot, primarily as an intermediary currency because i can buy bitcoins with money i hold in one currency, and then draw it out again in my local currency without incurring fees levied by existing currency exchange establishments.
Re: (Score:2)
This is truly a mystery.