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Comment by Kiro | Hacker News Reader

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

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.

Didn't bitcoin fork in it's early days and recover? What makes this unrecoverable?

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.

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.

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.

Early enough for not too many people to care.

If you tried to fork bitcoin today, it'd would be freakin' OVER++.

There was an accidental fork less than a year ago. A few miners lost money, but obviously Bitcoin recovered.

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.

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.

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.

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.

If someone hasn't traded since the fork, their coins are on both forks and it doesn't matter which fork is chosen.

If you haven't traded since the fork, then all your transactions are on the, um, "handle" part. Both sides of the fork will have all of your transactions, so they aren't lost.

If they haven't traded, won't their coins be on the common ancestor of either fork?

yeah, roughly. but also you have the effect that if you know precisely why some red bills pop up you can start a new fork for the green bills. so a 51% attack is by no means terminal. if an attack is terminal all coins on all chains are worthless, because the remaining network can be attacked again.

I really like this explanation; thank you.

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.

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