On the bitcoin reddit today, there was a discussion of storing exabytes of data on the network and then reading the data back from multiple accounts as an attack on maidsafe. The idea being that with that much data, you would overrun the caching and therefore the GETs would actually go all the way to the vaults, allowing the attacker to earn tons of safecoin. Also, the fact that you’re storing exabytes of data means there’s a good chance vaults you control will have some of that data.
Of course, the attacker needs to pay to store such a large amount of data. If the cost per gigabyte were never allowed to dip below some threshold, such attacks would be prohibitively expensive.
The number of exabytes that would be required for such an attack would vary with the size of the network. The larger the network, the more exabytes of data an attacker would need to store. Therefore, the cost/GB of storage needs to be kept higher for the network when it’s small, and only allowed to decrease as the network grows, so that the cost to attack the network is always kept in the “too expensive” category. This would probably happen naturally anyway, but if it doesn’t, perhaps an override function could limit how low the cost could go, based on network size.
Does any of this make sense? Or is this attack not possible anyway?
It’s just the usual, “Oh it’s a data network” “lets flood it”, “oh its a messaging system lets send millions of messages”, “oh it’s a blockchain let’s do millions of transaction”, see how amazingly clever I am these things are all scams and rubbish Hear it all the time for everything. It’s just boring really.
Given enough resource and time you can overpower any system, it comes down to how well it handles it and distributing evenly across an address range is gonna be the best you can get I think.
Then the whole xor thing comes in and you will hear that’s rubbish and … blah blah, ask folks what they would build or is everything just doomed I tell ye doomed
I mean to “attack” with GETs, you need to pay for them.
But yes, they’d also need enough bandwidth to attack. We need to assume that they would use their own computers - while they may be able to use malware to install a MaidSafe client, they would still have to pay for GETs.
Otherwise the only other approach is to find a vulnerability or steal pass phrases and pins of many MaidSafe users at once, in which case they’d be better off just stealing wallet contents and slowly selling them on the black market, or doing some ransom type of work.
To my knowledge the network pays the one holding a particular piece of data for the GET; hence farming. And the user storing data pays for PUTS. The user that stored the data either payed for puts by purchasing safecoin to pay or by farming with more space than he/she is storing. The safecoin gets recycled
Well, yes, but based on this part from the very top (below), I assumed they would make a paid service that would charge for these requests.
If they wanted to post a huge amount of data and make it available for free (e.g. GETs would be free), they’d have to pay for PUTs used to post that data.
(Also, one can’t decide where PUTs get stored, so they couldn’t earn shit this way. If they provided their own capacity they’d get no more than their relative share in the total available capacity. Assuming they had EB’s of available capacity and GETs were free, they’d spend a ton of SAFE on PUTs and make a fraction of SAFE from GETs).
But SAFE will never be in the position of being a metered toll road? Anything thats really going to grow would need to be bring your own hardware or flat rate. What could kill interest faster than have a mechanism that would allow arbitrary manipulation of metering rates for profit. That again comes back to the layered subletting of toll roads, or later on mesh people not wanting to pay for more than the capacity what they themselves bring.
It’s built to store data and balance supply /demand so greater use is fine. We should be wishing for it.