I have been following the ongoing debate about the capacity for eos to censor certain accounts. My interest lies in the fact that such censorship is in complete contradiction to everything I believe crypto should represent. In my reading, I stumbled on this steem post https://steemit.com/eos/@thecastle/oooohhhhhhh-x-wait-is-this-fucking-true, that presents tweets where @dan (Dan Larimer) claims that a given account could be censored by convincing only 3 of the top 5 miners to reject specific transactions. Deeper in this thread @dan claims "Give me control of 51% hashpower if any chain and I’ll freeze all accounts to prove point."
Here I show that @dan is positively mistaken and his statement qualifies as FUD against ethereum and any proof of work blockchain. In this analysis, I give @dan a lot of hashes with which to censor transactions and demonstrate he can not censor anyone temporarily with certainty, and can not censor anyone indefinitely with any chance of success.
Let's fist consider what is involved in a 51% attack. The way a 51% attack works is that you have two groups of miners. Public miners and secret miners. Secret miners aren't always secret, but I will call them secret to underscore how a 51% attack works.
The secret miners begin the 51% attack by picking a branch point on the chain on which it will add secret blocks. That is, these blocks are not broadcast to the public network. Exchanges don't see them, typical users don't see them, block explorers don't see them, etc.
The secret miners proceed to mine this secret chain until it has a significant length advantage over the public chain, then they publish the longer chain, at which point the public miners must reorganize chains and accept the longer chain that has more work.
To "censor" transactions, the attackers must systematically exclude particular accounts.
But there is a catch that @dan completely ignores: finality of transactions is not a function of the blockchain like @dan wishes it to be, it is a function of the real-world entities that interact with the blockchain. This concept of finality is what makes a 51% double spend attack work, by the way. (A 51% double spend attack is not the same as "censoring" with 51% of the hashes, which is the subject of the following analysis.)
Consider an exchange, like bittrex, that requires only two confirmations to credit a bitcoin transaction. Imagine if we "gave" @dan 51% of the bitcoin network to censor whoever he wished. Could he have success censoring this person from sending coins to bittrex? I won't present the math here, but this amounts to sampling problem where the chance of success for the censored party is about 44% on any try spanning two blocks (given some conservative assumptions about the variance of mining power--the more variance, the easier it is for Alice).
In other words, let's say @dan has 51% of the hashes, and is trying to censor Alice. Every 2 blocks, Alice tries to send her transaction to bittrex to spend it. She has a 44% chance each time she tries to push the transaction through.
Alice's censorship at this point turns into a joint probability, where after 1 day of 72 tries (144 bitcoin blocks per day) we calculate the probability Alice will fail all 72 times with a 56% (100% - 44%) probability of failure on each try.
Basically, Alices chances of failure are so infinitesimal (1 in 1.35x10^18), that her chances for success within one day is absolute, rounding to 100% after 16 decimal places.
Clearly @dan can not censor Alice, or anyone else, with only 51% of the bitcoin hashes.
Now, let's take an extreme example where we give @dan 66% of the ethereum network. Can he censor Alice from sending ETH if she can find an exchange that credits her balance after 5 confirmations? This would admittedly be a rare exchange, but she only needs one outlet to spend her ethereum to bypass @dan's censorship.
This turns into a sampling problem where Alice has an 0.01% chance of success over any 5 block interval. Now @dan has some real power. But can Alice push a transaction through in a day?
Because ethereum has 15 second blocks, Alice has 1152 tries per day to push her transaction through, each with an 0.01% chance of success (or 99.99% chance of failure). In this case, @dan is doing much better than he did with all the bitcoin mining power. Alice only has about an 11% chance after 1 day, about a 20% chance after two days, and about a 68% chance after 10 days. If Alice keeps trying for a month, she will have about a 97% chance of getting it through. And after 3 months she'll get it through with a 99.997% chance. Dan is likely to give up after 6 months because Alice will have succeeded with 99.9999999% probability.
Sorry @dan, you can't censor anyone indefinitely with only 2/3 of the ethereum hashes. You'll need much more.
Actually guys, Dan IS correct and pretty much everyone I am talking to seems to be saying it. Its an unlikely scenario.
This is a quote response from Reddit bringing up this point.
> correction: 100% of your transactions will not go through, since the 51% attack will be mining the longer chain
Not only that but its being brought to my attention that mining pools can be used to jack up the price as well. If they all decided to charge a higher fee then nothing can really stop them.
> In other words, let's say @dan has 51% of the hashes, and is trying to censor Alice. Every 2 blocks, Alice tries to send her transaction to bittrex to spend it. She has a 44% chance each time she tries to push the transaction through.
> Alice's censorship at this point turns into a joint probability, where after 1 day of 72 tries (144 bitcoin blocks per day) we calculate the probability Alice will fail all 72 times with a 56% (100% - 44%) probability of failure on each try.
> Basically, Alices chances of failure are so infinitesimal (1 in 1.35x10^18), that her chances for success within one day is absolute, rounding to 100% after 16 decimal places.
In this scenario, Alice is using her wallet to make money so she can do posts about the political situations in China. 3 / 5. Well the situation you describe is her wallet being made basically useless at this point. Her wallet is dead. If your transactions are not going through and they become super expensive, lets face it, that's a dead fucking wallet.
> Sorry @dan, you can't censor anyone indefinitely with only 2/3 of the ethereum hashes. You'll need much more.
They can continue this attack on Alice for as long as they want. It only takes a couple months to completely debilitate a person. They cant pay for food or rent.
I say its good enough to be counted as censorship. Alice might have been better off not using a crypto like ETH to down talk the chinese government. Its not impossible. It actually makes a ton of sense.
> do you not earn/own money you want to hold or increase in value ?
I earned a big chunk back when it was worth something. Its been in decline for awhile now and its pretty much garbage now. Its ROI is way lower then all coins in the top 10 easily. Sorry but Bitcoin is trash tier for gains.
> based on what
Dapps matter. Dapps are the most important aspect of crypto. Everything else is useless junk outside of a couple things like BNB, BAT ect.
> pets.com was the one of the most used and valuable sites during dotcom boom now is one website in billions
Sure. And Steemit 2.0 will probably decimate steemit 1.0 but dapps will be top dog regardless.
> dapps dont work at scale has been proven with ethereum issues when there are only thousands trying to use not functional at all
> using a blockchain for apps is counter-intuitive and cost prohibitive
You do realize steemit is a dapp right? Its doing fine at scale and its badass as fuck.
> I don't see Bitcoin recovering after this down turn, mainly because it has nothing to offer. A store of Value is gold and silver if you want to be technical.
Nah its trash hehe. Good luck though. I am not touching it.
> Bitcoin is a far greater value than gold or silver for many reasons main reasons being
Then why was it a worse hold in 2017 than ETH Doge XRP LTC
> If you know a crypto with more proven positives as this let me know and ill mention the rest
Cant run dapps, its slow, its expensive. I like making money more than losing money. Buy literally anything else dude, you will do better by EOY.
Anyway I am going to exit arguing on this guys thread. I have over stayed my welcome!
Peace.
> I earned a big chunk back when it was worth something. Its been in decline for awhile now and its pretty much garbage now. Its ROI is way lower then all coins in the top 10 easily. Sorry but Bitcoin is trash tier for gains.
when it was worth something? by that statement i guess you joined crypto late last year
bitcoin ROI in mining is based on mining code configuration if you dont have the experience you will struggle to even scale up with new chips
experienced miners mining bitcoin at cost of $2500
> Dapps matter. Dapps are the most important aspect of crypto. Everything else is useless junk outside of a couple things like BNB, BAT ect.
show me a dapp that works with a few thousand daily users
> Sure. And Steemit 2.0 will probably decimate steemit 1.0 but dapps will be top dog regardless.
we will need to reach steem 1.0 first if it ever launches, beta was close to being finished last year then nothing empty promises and surprise launch of SMTS after EOS announced
> Then why was it a worse hold in 2017 than ETH Doge XRP LTC
because it had already gained from 0.00009 to $19k
why do most alts lose double the amount bitcoin does?
> Cant run dapps, its slow, its expensive. I like making money more than losing money. Buy literally anything else dude, you will do better by EOY.
actually bitcoin can run dapps see "Lighting Apps"
also bitcoin isnt even at 10% functionality with many coming technologies will kill off many cryptos overnight with new bitcoin clones coming in the aftermath again