Bitcoin Gold Hit by Double Spend Attack, Exchanges Lose Millions - <AUTHOR> https://www.ccn.com/bitcoin-gold-hit-by-double-spend-attack-exchanges-lose-millions/ <comment><USER3> When Bitcoin was running up to $20,000, I tried to analyze the system and come to a personal conclusion about its equilibrium value, because I didn't want to miss out if it really was the currency of the future.

I ended up not investing, because of the possibility of a double-spend attack. I think that cryptocurrency enthusiasts are seriously underestimating the importance of double-spending attacks to the economics of bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies.

A few points that convinced me not to put my money into this system:

If hash capacity were traded on a perfectly competitive market, then it would always make sense to rent 51% of the capacity at market rates, earn the transaction fees, and also perform a double-spending attack. There is no equilibrium point for transaction fees where this attack becomes uneconomical. The only defense is that the market for hash capacity is imperfect.

The market for hash capacity is going to become more efficient over time. ASIC miners will be commoditized, so that hardware investment becomes a much smaller factor in hash cost versus energy. This might be even worse during a bitcoin downturn, because there could be a glut of ASIC miners.

Miners will coordinate with market prices, turning off capacity when the price dips (for example, because someone is underbidding to create a 51% attack). If mining becomes more decentralized, it will be harder for miners to act in their common interest (fending off 51% attacks) and against their immediate interest (selling their hashrate to the highest bidder, or taking it off the market during an underbidding attack).

High transaction volume is not necessarily any help - the more transaction volume, the higher the cost of the attack, but the greater the rewards. The semi-anonymous nature of bitcoin means that one could easily flood the network with double-spend transactions. Attacking a huge network like bitcoin would be an audacious and expensive act, but there are certainly organizations with the resources to do it, e.g. intelligence agencies, organized crime. The massive rewards to such an attack also offset fixed costs such as writing and testing the software to carry out the attack.

<comment><USER4> I think the argument is that by doing a 51% attack you undermine the market value so you never get the rewards. This makes sense, but only for the leading crypto coin. As we see here today, you can 51% attack smaller coins, which should imply an increase in the value of Bitcoin from consolidation.

<comment><USER5> The spooky thing that this made me realize, is that if anyone did find a vulnerability in bitcoin (or any cryptocurrency) is that they would have a greater incentive to only slowly leech off the system, because they will be able to siphon out much more over time than if everyone panics over security. The weapon is no good unless it's secret.

<comment><USER6> Nah, you could short-sell Bitcoin. Take out a sell option, crash the value, buy cheap, then exercise the option. Information is valuable, no matter which direction it predicts the market to go.

<comment><USER7> Where would you buy a put (sell) option on Bitcoin (without substantial counterparty or settlement risk)? I genuinely want to know. I would have bought one in November if I could have.

<comment><USER8> I've read about plans to introduce crypto currency ETFs, but I'm not aware of any that are publicly traded yet.

<comment><USER7> Even then it's not clear you'll be able to buy _options_ on them...

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Oddly enough, one of the selling points of Bitcoin Gold (a hard fork of Bitcoin) was its use of Equihash instead of SHA-256. The idea was that a memory-hard proof-of-work function would inoculate Bitcoin Gold from miner centralization.

The problem with mining centralization is that sufficiently powerful miners can attack the network by rewriting blocks. This opens the door to double spending.

This was exactly the attack the article described.

It appears that Bitcoin Gold's decision to use Equihash led to this mess. The algorithm is used by several other coins. Hardware optimized for this algorithm can therefore be used with equal ease to mine on a network or attack it.

Bitcoin Cash may be headed for a similar fate. It retains SHA-256, but is a minority chain in terms of hash power. A powerful Bitcoin miner deciding to perform double spends on Bitcoin Cash would have everything needed to do repeat the Bitcoin Gold attack.

BTW, a similar attack recently occured on Verge:

[https://blog.theabacus.io/the-verge-hack- explained-7942f63a3...](https://blog.theabacus.io/the-verge-hack- explained-7942f63a3017)

It's possible that any altcoin that becomes sufficiently valuable will suffer similar attacks to the ones that have now taken place on Verge and Bitcoin Gold.

<comment><USER10> The problem I think is that there are 25 cryptocurrencies bigger than it. Particularly with its form of mining, it's trivially easy for say a big player in the 10th largest currency to shift their mining power to a smaller one like Bitcoin Gold, overpowering everything else.

Normally the non-51% attack argument is that anyone who invests enough in 51% of the infrastructure and has sufficient coins to profit from double-spending, is very unlikely to do so because it would render the coins and mining equipment worthless or at least worth less than the investment had cost.

That'd be true for bitcoin, but not for a GPU-mined 26th largest cryptocurrency. You can completely destroy it, cash out and use your equipment elsewhere on coins in which people still have faith.

<comment><USER11> so how exactly do you cash out? by exchanging double spent coins for btc or usd? but then can't exchanges just stop that from happening?

<comment><USER12> I'm not even sure you would need to exchange it to another coin. You would never be exchanging it to USD because USD withdrawals will require you to identify yourself and a corresponding bank account. To withdraw crypto you just need an address.

So you can exchange it to BTC or ETH and withdraw. Or you can just deposit it and withdraw it after. Most exchanges just mix customer funds together, so as long as the exchange has enough BTG balance minus the double spent deposit, they will send you real BTG.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> So this would require an attacker to pay into the exchange with BTCg, have the deposit clear and approve for trading, trade it for another currency, and have that trade settle and be clear for withdrawal, and then process the withdrawal, all in under 4 hours. After which point the attacking miner surfaces a longer chain they had been keeping which doesn't include the original BTCg deposit.

Alternatively, if the exchange isn't smart enough to pay short-term withdrawals with inputs that link back to the recent deposit, an attacker could just deposit and then withdraw with no trade and the withdraw transaction is valid even if the deposit is double-spent.

An exchange that lets a trader deposit millions in one crypto-asset, exchange it for another, and clear a withdrawl in 4 hours... got what was coming to them? Where's the KYC process for a million-dollar deposit?

There's a reason new deposits in a brokerage account take a few days to settle / be cleared for trading. And again after selling before funds can be withdrawn. And that's a currency where most transactions can be reversed!

It would be one thing to allow 10 block settlement for Bitcoin main-net. It's another to allow it with a thinly mined alt-coin.

<comment><USER14> Exchanges need to be built with the fluid nature of blockchain conflict resolution in mind.

You can estimate the cost of double-spend attacks on each chain at any time, calculate your potential exposure, track where the related funds are now in your system, and mitigate your exposure by delaying the outflow of funds that have outsize exposure to double-spend attack potential.

In the simple case, you might allow withdrawal of a single $10 deposit after 2 confirmations but enforce a long 1000-confirmation waiting period on a million-dollar deposit, in order to increase the cost of executing a double- spend against your exchange beyond the point which you estimate it becomes infeasible.

It's a little trickier in practice because someone could split their million- dollar deposit into 1000 thousand-dollar deposits from separate addresses into separate accounts. But you can still track your exposure in aggregate, and you should design a system to hold all impacted funds as long as is necessary to make a double-spend attack infeasible.

You can be upfront with your clients about what's happening and why their withdrawals are sometimes delayed: it would increase confidence in the safety of honest customers' deposits while discouraging thieves from targeting you.

<comment><USER15> >But you can still track your exposure in aggregate, and you should design a system to hold all impacted funds as long as is necessary to make a double- spend attack infeasible.

also, you can monitor the value of transactions in the last few blocks. 500% spike in transaction value in the last 2 blocks? better add a few more blocks to the confirmation requirement, or require withholding on those deposits.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER16> more details here:

[https://forum.bitcoingold.org/t/double-spend-attack-on- excha...](https://forum.bitcoingold.org/t/double-spend-attack-on- exchanges/1362/17)

Bitcoin gold was a fork to try and decentralize mining. It changed to a proof of work that is supposed to be ASIC resistant. It looks like the typical situation is mining by GPU for equihash (BTG PoW).

BTG hashrate is at ~30MH/s at the moment, where Zcash's hashrate is at ~486MH/s.

I don't have the numbers off hand, but it'd be interesting to see how many GPUs you'd need to pull of a double spend against BTG and if any of the other equihash coins saw a drop off during the attack.

It'd be really interesting if it wasn't a rental attack, but an invested miner just switching over to BTG to achieve the hack.

They reversed 22 blocks, the recommendation is to increase the # of confirmations to rely upon to 50. If you are trying to react to 51% attack doubling the number of confirmations only doubles the cost of attack, and the attacker likely just doubled the number of BTG they have. If they can pay the electricity/rental cost for the attack they have enough BTG to execute the attack in a cost effective manner again.

<comment><USER17> You can rent hashing power on Nicehash, which currently has ~77MSol/s available for rent. I'm not 100% familiar with how the auction process works, but it looks like I could purchase 26MSol/s via a fixed contract for 1 hour for ~1BTC.

Am I misunderstanding something here, or can I maintain a 51% attack right now for ~$8k an hour. This can't be right.

<comment><USER18> It is risky, but it is right, that's exactly why took a while to happen. A relatively small botnet can overtake many smaller coins in hash power in no time, that's the hypothesis where I'd put the money.

</comment></comment></comment><comment> mike-cardwell Crypto currencies are worthless unless they have an enormous amount of hashing power behind them.

We could really do with a webpage with a list of crypto currencies, the hashing power currently behind them, and how much it would cost somebody to take over 50% of the network.

Or does that already exist?

<comment><USER19> So, that's an interesting pair of ideas, in that it gets me thinking that any Bitcoin-style cryptocurrency might ultimately be doomed by its own design.

Shooting from the hip:

They've go this 51% vulnerability that is well known and hypothetically cannot be truly closed. Instead, we rely on the idea that mounting such an attack would be "too expensive". But at the same time, the cost/benefit of mounting such an attack is fairly easy to estimate using public data - all you really need to know is the cost to get to 51% and stay there for a given amount of time, which you can infer by monitoring mining activity, and the current price of the currency you'd want to attack. And you have to assume that whenever the cost of mounting such an attack dips below the benefit, such a thing _will_ happen.

So then, I think that implies that the only other feature you'd need to throw into the mix to ensure a cryptocurrency is ultimately doomed is to make the rate at which new coin can be mined asymptotically approach zero. Such a feature would mean that, in the long term, miners' revenue would ultimately be dominated by transaction fees, which, this being a supremely commodity service, market forces will presumably tend to keep relatively low. That would, in turn, limit the number of miners the economy can support, which would serve to limit the cost of mounting a 51% attack.

Meanwhile, what with a money supply that can't grow being inherently deflationary, the _benefit_ of mounting such an attack would be constantly growing, for as long as said cryptocurrency remains in use.

<comment><USER20> On the other hand, there will be people who have a vested interest in preventing such attacks. If you own a lot of BTC, a successful attack can drastically lower the value of your assets, so it makes sense to deploy some of that capital to secure the network. And of course this goes even more so for business in the crypto space that rely on BTC remaining secure.

One example of this sort of behavior is in mining. We tend to think of miners as being selfish to a fault, and to some degree, that's true. But sometimes miners have the opportunity to mine empty blocks (a form of attack), and refrain from doing so, because it would harm the ecosystem as a whole and jeopardize their long-term profitability.

<comment><USER21> Spending capital to build hash capacity to protect an existing holding in BTC is inherently deflationary. Instead of "you need to spend money to make money" aka inflation/interest/growth, you have to spend money to keep money, which always reduces your holdings over time and turns the entire network over to companies that produce hashing capacity (hardware manufacturers, power companies).

<comment><USER22> But the initial assumption was that of an efficient market for hash power, which means the cost to hash is equal to the block rewards. And so deploying some capital to secure the network is nets zero loss.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment> B-Con > Ordinarily, the blockchain would resolve this by including only the first > transaction in the block, but the attacker was able to reverse transactions > since they had majority control of the network.

Not a very precise explanation, just checking, what exactly does this mean?

I always thought the way a 51% double-spend attack worked was by broadcasting a transaction for human consumption (eg, I'll give you Y coins for Z dollars), then secretly mining your own blockchain for the N successive chains following it. After the humans have completed the human-level transactions after waiting the standard N successive blocks with no transaction conflicts, you release your own secret blockchain fork back into the public with data that contradicts the current popular one and instruct your network to ignore the competing publicly-acceptable chain. The new private one wins so long as it is equally as long as the public one which it should be because you have more compute power than the rest of the public.

Is that basically what happened here?

<comment><USER23> You are correct. The longest chain is accepted as the correct one, so if you have 51% hashpower and secretly mine while maintaining majority hashpower the whole time, your chain will be longer and you can publish it at any time, and effectively rewrite recent history.

<comment><USER24> Has there been other approaches at solving the double spend problem? I know ByteCoin (which is from scratch and uses 'CryptoNote' (or CryptoNight?) and respectively it's forks which includes Monero are designed a little different and I think they boast having solved the double spend problem too but I am not sure if they just do the same decisions as Bitcoin concerning updating the Blockchain?

Anyone care to weigh in on this?

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> >Obtaining this much hashpower is incredibly expensive

Is it? Presumably you only need to maintain it for a short amount of time. Sounds like something one could smash with google cloud preemptible GPUs or similar. Especially since such an attacker is presumably not above using a stolen CC or three.

<comment><USER26> Under normal free market assumptions, the cost of double spending is simply the expected reward of each block multiplied by the number of blocks that need to be mined. For bitcoin, where the reward for finding a block is currently ~$100,000, that means you should be able to double spend by mining 6 blocks at a cost of less than a million dollars.

The question is: are bitcoin miners subject to the usual free market assumptions? If someone offered you double the market rate to hire a bitcoin miner for an hour would you accept that offer or not?

<comment><USER27> As a miner, you are likely not going to accept because your entire revenue stream comes from the cryptocurrency being stable. If someone uses your hashrate to launch an attack, it's a direct threat to your future revenue especially if the attack discredits the security of the token you mine.

In this case though, Bitcoin Gold shares a hashing algorithm (Equihash) with many other blockchains. It is possible that some Zcash mining farm decided to attack Bitcoin Gold because they felt the revenue from attacking Bitcoin Gold was greater than the potential damage to their income, which is primarily Zcash based.

I'm just grasping at straws here, but generally speaking it's a bad idea to share hashing algorithms with another cryptocurrency, especially if that cryptocurrency is substantially more valuable (in terms of monthly block reward) than your own.

And, all GPU-mined coins are essentially sharing one algorithm, because the hardware can jump between them easily. So all GPU based coins share this vulnerability, where the tiny GPU mined coins could easily be attacked or wiped out by a large Ethereum farm at any point.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER28> I'm just waiting for the day when it's revealed that ~70% of miners on a top 5 cryptocurrency are compromised by a specialized worm or malware. We'll probably only find out after the double spending is discovered but this type of outcome seems almost inevitable. The people writing this type of software are definitely financially motivated, but I can easily imagine such a person throwing away millions of dollars in 0-days just to fulfill such a hackneyed cyberpunk cliche.

Also, we know that things like stuxnet exist. Imagine something even a fraction as crazy as that targeting mining nodes. It's going to happen eventually.

<comment><USER15> >We'll probably only find out after the double spending is discovered but this type of outcome seems almost inevitable

attacks like this is harder to pull off than you think. miners constantly submit "shares" to the pool, which are then validated to credit them a share in the block reward[1]. depending on the difficulty threshold of the shares are, these could be submitted a few times a minute to every few minutes. if you hacked and gained control of the miners, sure you can redirect all the hashing power to you, but this will be detected quite quickly. with thousands of dollars on the line per minute, you can bet that everybody has monitoring in place to detect a dip in shares submission. also keep in mind that you have to keep this going for about 1 hour (for your initial transaction to confirm) without people noticing. moreover, the core problem stealing hash power to do a 50% attack is that block times will skyrocket on the main chain, which will let everybody (and not just the pool operator) know that something's up. plus after this attack, you can bet that exchanges will start requiring additional confirmations for large deposits, and instituting withholding times for cryptocurrency withdraws.

[1] I don't know whether large mining operators do this. Strictly speaking, they don't but I'd imagine they do this because it lets them know that their rigs are up and producing valid hashes (ie. not malfunctioning). It's almost certain that small mining operators use pools.

<comment><USER28> You're right that there are a few canaries in the coal mine, but there are a lot of creative options if you have the ability to execute arbitrary code on a mining node botnet, _assuredly_ some of which are yet to be discovered (as far as we know). Consider as well the many financial opportunities available to someone who may have an interest in sabotaging or disrupting some kind of mining activity, perhaps in subtle ways that are not usually noticed.

<comment><USER29> They could fake the results to make it look like everything was ok while the attack happened. That's apparently what stuxnet did: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17099969](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17099969)

<comment><USER15> with that method, you might be able to fool the mining operator's monitoring system (assuming you also pwn their pool server), but you can't fool the whole network. there's simply no way to hide a 50% drop in network hashrate.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> How many millions? Is it time to update [http://dayssinceacryptocurrencyexchangehaslostmorethan100mil...](http://dayssinceacryptocurrencyexchangehaslostmorethan100million.com/) ?

Meh. I think I'm just gonna go ahead and add it. I haven't been paying close attention. I'm sure I've missed 1 or 2.

</comment><comment><USER31> Knee jerk reaction: Good.

However since it is a 'Bitcoin cash' type coin this will ultimately hurt bitcoin and the community as a whole. I can already see the buzz "Bitcoin double spending attack!" articles

<comment><USER32> seems more ammo for the argument by Bitcoin Maximalists - cant easily own/manipulate a larger network

<comment><USER33> Also minimalists.

<comment><USER32> ah, yes. never forget the devil you know.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER34> Satoshi really downplayed 51% attacks in his/her original whitepaper[1]:

> _The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker > is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have > to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, > or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to > play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than > everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his > own wealth._

Apparently he didn't realize that coins could quickly be transferred to other crypto and not held, so who cares about the value of the stolen goods.

[1] [https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf](https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf)

<comment><USER35> But wouldn't the long-term honest mining be more profitable than a single hit and run? Kinda the same reason that when you go to a restaurant the restaurant owners almost always exchange food for money rather than rob you and leave town forever. If you own a restaurant it's generally more profitable to run it honestly than run away with a one-time dishonest payoff.

<comment><USER36> Not if it destroys the credibility of a rival coin, which I suspect could be the case here. Many in the "real Bitcoin" community call Bitcoin Cash a fraud because its existence reveals the specious value of their "real" cryptocurrency.

Executing a double spend attack on Bitcoin Cash would be a massive success for Bitcoin owners. Same goes for Bitcoin Gold.

You could even create a mining pool/network - let's call it CoinFucker - <USER2> every now and then the pool's resources were diverted to attack a rival coin. Doing so damages that coin's reputation, and in doing so reduces the competition. This would be a great way for the majority of mining/computational power to squash would-be rivals.

<comment><USER37> I'm not sure in this specific case it would make sense for Bitcoin users. Unless you are already involved in cryptocurrencies, I'm not sure the average person is going to differentiate between "Bitcoin" and "Bitcoin Gold" \-- the negative impression of "Bitcoin Gold hit by attack" is going to reflect on the original Bitcoin.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> So much energy from the brightest minds of our age dedicated to getting something for nothing. I'm outa here.

<comment><USER39> Yeah, producing software is insane.

<comment><USER38> I was referring to those out to game the system, not the creators of the software. Then again, I have the same contempt for stock market traders, currency speculators and purveyors of financial "products", "instruments" or any other crazy term invented to make getting something for nothing sound respectable.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER40> I met the founder of Bitcoin Gold a few month before, I can not tell if there is any other reason he forked bitcoin than mere profit. He said he was going to fork ether as well. Given the speculative nature of the people involved in this network. could this be a inside job?

</comment><comment><USER41> Every POW coin should either switch to POS or if they are going to stick with POW they need to focus on a different algorithm and let ASIC development happen. The key to being a weaker chain is to encourage the community to build an ASIC just for your coin. I don't understand this push by many POW coins on sticking with commodity hardware, except for a few giants (zcash, eth, monero) you're going to get destroyed.

Dedicated ASIC only for your chain = good. Commodity hardware = bad.

</comment><comment><USER42> How is the price [https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/bitcoin- gold/usd](https://www.coingecko.com/en/price_charts/bitcoin-gold/usd) still good when this is all over the news?

<comment><USER43> This isn't the first time terrible news has broke and somehow a coin remains valuable.

Remember when Bitcoin forked into Bitcoin Cash and somehow everyone just made up a new value for the coin?

It was like billions of dollars were created out of thin air, everyone started trading it and nobody batted an eye. Bitcoin even GAINED value.

There is no logic or sanity in the coin market.

<comment><USER44> > In August, a group split the chain to create a new form of Bitcoin that they > called Bitcoin Cash. The two blockchains shared a transaction history up > until the time of the split, giving anyone who held any number of Bitcoins > until the so-called hard fork the equivalent number of Bitcoin Cash on the > new fork. (A hard fork is a software change that runs the risk of splitting > the blockchain into two, particularly if the community disagrees about it. > If you follow Ethereum or cryptocurrency, you may have heard that Ethereum > split into Ethereum and Ethereum Classic after a contentious hard fork.) > However, many people who didn't support Bitcoin Cash dumped their coins > quickly, and, after initially spiking up to $900, the price has now deflated > to about $300.

[https://firenewsfeed.com/news/635991](https://firenewsfeed.com/news/635991)

Good God you're not kidding.

It's like a car accident, but there's this siren song urging you to join in because some of the people are thrown free holding chunks of gold.

It reminds me of a Jim Gaffigan joke. He's talking about trying to lose weight, and how hard it is when the fast food restaurant has a $2 for 2 burgers deal... "Well... I don't want to lose money on this... I'll take eighty."

On the one hand this whole cryptocurrency thing seems to be gone off the rails. On the other hand, I do feel kinda dumb for not owning any.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER45> If Bitcoin became the dominant currency of humanity, eventually we'd darken the galaxy by building Dyson shells in the ultimate energy arms race to prevent a 51% attack.

Joking. Mostly.

<comment><USER46> Having fun with your idea:

How do you adjust the algorithm for the communication time between opposite nodes. Let's say earth distance, 16 minutes at speed of light direct.

<comment><USER47> You don't; it simply takes 200,000 years to confirm your transaction is in the highest-work chain in the galaxy.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Bitcoin Gold has a director of communications?

</comment><comment><USER49> Curious if this is illegal in anyway?

I suppose there will be increasing incentive to do the numbers on the hash cost to take over a coin and to execute these attacks.

Neat.

<comment> mike-cardwell I think stealing is illegal, yes.

<comment><USER50> Is this stealing by whatever definition police/the courts currently use? Isn't it an intentional part of the design of a cryptocurrency that decisions are made by a consensus based on hashing power?

If you have 51% of the hashing power, you have control over that cryptocurrency; that's by design. Can you really steal at that point?

edit: to those replying, I'm not saying this double spend is ethically fine, or not theft in the common parlance. I'm saying it's not entirely clear to me a court would find this to be theft. Think about the Ethereum hard fork to undo the DAO hack; there, a majority of the hashing power undid a bunch of transactions. I wouldn't call that theft (because it was undoing a hack?) but it doesn't seem that different to this situation.

<comment><USER27> Uh, yes, you can steal. Just because the vault is open at a bank doesn't mean that you can walk in, take the money and leave, and then claim that it's yours because they didn't lock the door.

When you send money to an exchange, there's an understanding that the money now belongs to the exchange. The exchange waits 6 confirmations to ensure that the money is not easily stolen, but the money legally belongs to the exchange as soon as the transaction is sent.

\</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment></comment><comment>---

Also, a 51% attack doesn't give you control over the cryptocurrency. You still have to follow the rules of the system, you can't print extra money from thin air, you can't spend money you don't control, the most you can do is change the ordering of the transactions that have happened on the system. And a lot of times, those transactions have block height or block id dependencies, which means you are even limited in your power to do that.

A 51% attacker is not God. They have a limited set of actions they can take, and while certain forms of stealing are included in that set of actions, it's overall a pretty limited set of things that you can do.

</comment><comment><USER51> What's interesting to me is that the bit game theory that is supposed to make such an attack unprofitable seems not to be holding here. Supposedly the idea that the blockchain was insecure would devalue the coin to such a degree as to disincentive people from attempting these sorts of attacks. I see virtually no movement in the price of BTG and relatively little in XVG (also attacked this week). If anything, the fact that the chain's integrity can be compromised and nothing happens appears to undermine a core assumption of Nakamoto consensus.

<comment><USER15> >Supposedly the idea that the blockchain was insecure would devalue the coin to such a degree as to disincentive people from attempting these sorts of attacks

The original claim was:

>He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth

what satoshi didn't take into account, is the rise of "cloud mining" services and thousands of competing "alt-coins" using the same hashing algorithm.

</comment></comment><comment><USER52> A few thoughts:

\- It rubs me the wrong way to call it an "exploit" when 51% attacks are a core part of the way blockchains function.

\- I'm surprised that the price for bitcoin gold isn't tanking. That's a sign that the crypto marketplace really isn't healthy right now, imo

\- Conversely I'm surprised that this isn't causing a spike in coins that are more robust in regards to 51% attacks, like BTC and BURST (because they're both the majority coin in the realm of the resources they require)

</comment><comment><USER53> This puzzles me. Although a miner with enough hash power can do a double spend, it's obvious from the blockchain that they did so. To bring this off, you have to have huge hash power and be anonymous. That limits the number of possible attackers.

Bitmain could do this to Bitcoin, but everybody knows where Bitmain is.

</comment><comment><USER54> The team behind Cardano is proving their algorithms. I think they have even proven Bitcoin in the process, of proving their own algos.

I guess this is why one would like proofs, and proglangs that can (to some extend) incorporate the proofs/laws so your code is checked against them.

</comment><comment><USER55> If all that is required to reverse transactions is 51% control, cannot the transactions that occurred during the double spend attack also be reversed by a 51% coalition once the attacker loses its majority?

<comment><USER10> Sure but it doesn't solve anything. Remember that people do not trade token A for token A. You don't buy dollars with dollars. You use dollars to buy something else, like euros.

So you may reverse one token, but you won't be able to reverse the other.

i.e. suppose you have $100 and I have 100 tokens (e.g. bitcoin gold coins). You pay me $100 and I give you the coins. I now double-spend and sell the coins to someone else. You now have no coins and no money. I then double-spend that and give the coins to myself.

You could at some point fix this and get the coins back, technically. But you're not going to get your $100 back. Nor is the other person. And the other person never got his coins. So both of you are out of money, and only one has the token. Theft occurred.

Moreover, even if you somehow both had the coins, they ought to be worthless because the entire system is completely useless. If a system can be compromised like this, the tokens have no value. Just like a dollar bill has no value if it can be printed, or can magically be transferred to a thief at the click of a button.

I used dollars in this example, but the more likely avenue of attack is for the attacker to sell his bitcoin gold for other cryptocurrencies like bitcoin over and over. Like selling an expensive bicycle to a customer but keeping the key to the lock, stealing it at night and selling it to someone else, a dozen times in the span of a few hours.

All of this is a major issue without even getting into the political discussion on forming a coalition and deciding which transactions were fair, genuine, worthy to keep, and which weren't. That's virtually impossible, particularly when there's one set of double-triple-quadruple-spent coins out there to distribute with many people making equal claims that they were scammed.

<comment><USER55> Thanks for the clear and detailed explanation!

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER56> <snark>Remind me again why cryptocurrency are a good idea</snark>

Seriously, the idea of smart contracts can truly be of value if attacks like this are no longer possible.

</comment><comment><USER57> The strange thing about this is that there is no visible effect on the price of BTG. It is going down true - but most crypto go down now - and when you look at the chart you would not guess that there was such a dramatic event: [https://cryptowat.ch/markets/bitfinex/btg/usd](https://cryptowat.ch/markets/bitfinex/btg/usd)

</comment><comment><USER58> Well it was scamish to begin with. 100,000 coins were premined when it forked. With a lot less mining competition a double spend attack was just waiting to happen. It is possible to also do a double spend attack on Bitcoin and Bitcoin Cash. It's just not very feasible because you would need A LOT of hashing power. So this comes as no surprise to me at least.

</comment><comment><USER59> If Bitcoin Gold weren't worthless before, it is now.

If it weren't so difficult and risky to sell this, it would be worth almost nothing already.

<comment><USER15> only down 10-20%

</comment></comment><comment><USER60> Stupid question: If an attack allows to successfully double spend, can you also triple spend or quadruple spend?

<comment><USER61> Well sort of.

Double spending is just convincing the network you've sent coins to multiple places, and then undoing all of the transactions that were 'paying' for something (in this case paying for credits at an exchange).

The actual details of what they were doing matters and I don't know them, but it's almost certainly simpler to chain double spends together, one after the other, than to try and do three or more transactions concurrently then reverse most of them.

This achieves the same thing as a triple or quadruple spend but only necessitates reversing one transaction at a time.

</comment></comment><comment><USER62> Is there a laymans explination for this attack?

"but the attacker was able to reverse transactions since they had majority control of the network."

I thought these crypto currencies didn't allow for reversing a transaction? Or is this "reversing" such as just deposit and then withdraw?

<comment><USER63> Someone please correct me, but here's my best explanation.

When you first connect to the Bitcoin network, how do you find out what the true blockchain is? You connect to other nodes and ask them. They may tell you anything. However, it's easy to verify whether a blockchain given in a response is valid. That is, it's easy to tell if a given blockchain is following all of the rules.

But what if you receive a few valid blockchains that are different from one another? Which one is the true blockchain for the world?

You simply choose the longest blockchain that you hear about.

Why the longest? It's the one that has had the most computing power focused on it. Anyone can compute a very small, self-serving, malicious blockchain of a few blocks. But to compute the longest blockchain in the world requires vast computing resources. The longest blockchain is supposed to be uncontrollable by any single party or network of colluders because it is supposed to be too hard to acquire the majority of the computing resources in the world.

Unfortunately, it looks like someone did just this and controlled >51% of all computing resources in the world dedicated to Bitcoin Gold. If you have enough resources, you can generate the longest blockchain in the world, add a self- serving transaction, get some goods or service in return, then recompute a new longest chain in the world where that transaction is no longer there. Everyone by default accepts the longest blockchain because it's supposed to be the most safe, but they are wrong.

<comment><USER62> Thank you!

I'm not well versed in the block chain tech but it is surprising that there is an inherent big ass monopoly type manipulation you can run ... inherent to the system.

That seems very much not what Bitcoin would "intend" and yet there it is, very available.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER64> How is the price not crashing? It's down 10%, which is pretty much like the rest of the market.

<comment><USER65> Because shitcoin prices have no relation to any sort of reality. Some shitcoins are traded on exchanges even if no actual coin or code existed.

<comment><USER64> They would exist as ERC20 tokens I believe...?

<comment><USER66> EOS has begin trading without any of that. Now it's a ERC20 token, I guess, but still there is no code, no network, no nothing -- and in fact their creators have declared they won't be starting the network or whatever, they're just selling "the idea". The tokens themselves have no value at all, they only _hope_ that whenever someone starts the network they will give some privileges to the current token holders.

<comment><USER67> >but still there is no code, no network, no nothing

EOS mainnet launch is June 2nd, 9 days away. There's lots of code: [https://github.com/EOSIO/eos](https://github.com/EOSIO/eos)

Check this cool demo out: [https://eosauthority.com/space/](https://eosauthority.com/space/)

<comment><USER66> Ok, many things may have changed, my latest information was from about an year ago, when there were people buying the token already.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER68> It's weird the reaction on cryptocurrency prices today has been so correlated, you'd expect a flight from smaller more vulnerable coins into the larger market caps.

Then again maybe everyone is just freaking out about the tether expansion...

</comment><comment><USER69> So BTG has a hash rate in the order of tens of M using the same hashing algorithm that is used on the ETH network, which has a hash rate in the order of hundreds of T? So a millionth (10e-6) of ETH hashrate could 51% BTG?

</comment><comment><USER70> What do you want to bet the attacker shorted other crypto while they were at it?

</comment><comment><USER71> Anyone well versed in this topic care to comment about how these attacks might/might not relate to the 'proof of work vs proof of stake' debate in the wider cryptocurrency world?

</comment><comment><USER72> I am just going to say two things: 1 it was only a matter of time 2 LoL

<comment><USER73> But what about my Lambo?!!

<comment><USER74> Exchange owners probably already have lambos.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER75> _No one would ever actually do a double spend attack as it would be more profitable to mine the currency instead_ \--Every cryptocurrency enthusiast ever.

</comment><comment><USER76> That's going to be okay though, right? Given that it's clear fraud, the FDIC should be able to step in and make investors whole, right?

</comment><comment><USER47> I met the founder of Bitcoin Gold at a meetup which turned out to be a sales pitch for Bitconnect, funnily enough.

</comment><comment><USER77> Yes Bitcoin is vulnerable to a 51% attack right now and so are all other PoW coins.

That's why crypto is still in its infancy.

</comment><comment><USER78> That's why Proof-of-stake is the way to go, you will never see a major coinholder undermining the coin

</comment><comment><USER79> Is there any way to prevent 51% attacks in bitcoin forks besides increasing confirmations?

</comment><comment><USER80> To me, this shows how Bitcoin type cryptocurrency mining incentives line up. For good actors, there is little to no incentive to seek 51% capacity whereas there is a lot of incentive for bad actors to seek it. As an economic activity, the logic of ruthless competition makes double spend capability the holy grail. Double spend is the sole reward for 51% capacity.

</comment><comment><USER81> I hate to toss in a commonplace, but can't anyone here play this game?

</comment><comment><USER82> I wonder if the idea for this attack came from Silicon Valley tv series

<comment><USER83> Nope, this has been happening every year for the last 7 years. Great series though :)

</comment></comment><comment><USER84> Wait a minute. Isn't bitcoin supposed to be immune from this?

</comment><comment><USER85> Who is taking the money? What is it going to be spent on?

</comment><comment><USER85> 3 attacks in one week?! Who needs this kind of money?

</comment><comment><USER86> Bolivar isn't goitto zero.

Bitcoin base value is comedy value .. ok.

</comment><comment><USER87> Purely hypothetical and mostly stupid: could double spending attacks be a way to overcome the issue of a limited supply of coins and the fact the total number of coins tends to zero as old coins are lost?

<comment><USER88> No, because transactions are reversed in double spend attacks. It does not increase the supply.

</comment></comment><comment><USER89> how the heck did he acquire majority hash? Afaiu, this requires massive computational resources that no individual has access to

</comment><comment><USER90> Hence why Iota is still using their coordinator.

<comment><USER15> centralization does solve a lot of issues, but at that point you might as well go with a postgres instance.

</comment></comment><comment><USER91> maybe Bitcoin Diamond will prove harder

<comment><USER74> I see what you did there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER92> play stupid games (like listing shitcoins) win stupid prizes

</comment><comment><USER74> And the freakout cycle begins anew.

</comment><comment><USER93> Oh dear, it's not looking good for Bitcoin. Will Bitcoin recover, or should we let other crypto kings such as Verge take over already?</comment>


Abandoned Frank Lloyd Wright – Tour of Shams Palace, Iran - EB-Barrington https://yomadic.com/shams-palace-iran-tour/ <comment><AUTHOR> My dad likes Frank's work but it drives me nuts. We went to the Talliessen tour and that killed what begrudging respect I had left.

The man removed a load bearing wall from his sister's house for pity's sake. Others had to redo the work later when the house started to sag. Two of his students added a concrete lintel to a crooked wall _to stop it from falling over_.

His theories often created the sort of existential crisis (especially chronic water damage, one of my personal bugaboos) for the buildings that I find negligent. I get bristly about programmers who behave the same way. The beauty of their creation is what's important, not the utility to the inhabitants.

As far as I'm concerned the man was a menace.

Usually I keep this opinion for off-the-rails software engineering meetings or anecdotes over beers, because I get that it's not that popular, I'm kind of a downer for tearing down an inspirational figure. But shag carpet next to a goddamned pool was my tipping point. What the fuck.

<comment><USER2> Pretty strong commentary about an architect who clearly created many beautiful and lasting works - not sure where the vitriol is coming from. His houses are absolutely artworks, and should be treated as such, despite their maintenance woes. Have you ever been to Falling Water? It's had huge problems -- recently mostly remedied -- but is an inspiring and magical creation.

<comment><USER3> I'd agree with you if he was just creating artworks meant to be observed from the outside, but he wasn't.

He was designing buildings that were also intended to be lived in or used for some functional purpose by people.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER4> Can we get a title change? This is NOT a work of FLW, but of his successors after his death.

</comment><comment><USER5> FYI the building described in TFA was designed by William Wesley Peters, not Frank Lloyd Wright.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but no one is going to click on the article without "frank loyde wright" on the title...

</comment></comment><comment><USER6> _"Nezam Amery was the indispensable link in the Frank Lloyd Wright /Iran/Shams Palace story – and his father had been assassinated by the father of his client, Princess Shams."_</comment>


Parakey: Did Investors Get Left Out In The Cold? - <AUTHOR> http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/09/25/parakey-did-investors-get-left-out-in-the-cold/ <comment><USER2> Doubling your investment in six months is pretty good, but VCs would much rather wait three or four years and get 20 times their investment. Since it's a minority of companies that turn a profit for their investors, a Parakey- scale success is not the kind of thing that VCs dream about. $4 million is probably less than Sequoia invests in most of its companies, so it's certainly less than they're hoping to get out. If they turned a $2 million profit, that's a piddling 1% return for a $200 million fund.

This is a really interesting case of founders turning the tables on VCs. When there's a lop-sided outcome, it's usually, from what I gather, the VCs who come out on top. I wonder how much of the uniqueness of this had to do with Blake and Joe's high profile (and their presumably resultant ability to get unusually favorable terms from investors).

</comment><comment><USER3> Parakey had an incredible number of people involved in their angel round. I'm sure almost no one had a substantial (money-wise) investment in these guys. The early exit was probably somewhat disappointing relative to what could've been a huge late exit, but you can't be too sad doubling up that fast.

In other news, Facebook has $4million in cash to hire two people with??

<comment><USER4> Edit: I needed to reread the article.

<comment><USER5> Reread the article.

<comment><USER4> OK, I get it. All the cash compensation went to the investors.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER6> PG: as an investor, how do you feel about this?</comment>


What Would Happen if Bitcoin Reaches $1000 - <AUTHOR> http://btcgeek.com/what-would-happen-if-bitcoin-reaches-1000/ <comment><USER2> One odd effect, the payout for mining a block varies based on the transaction fees paid that round. Even if transaction fees continue to bounce between 25 and 50 BTC, mining rewards (denominated in USD) will begin to fluctuate wildly.

<comment><AUTHOR> That's a good point. Perhaps the minimum/recommended transaction fees will also reduce because the operating costs of mining equipment now, electricity, is paid in fiat instead of Bitcoin.</comment></comment>


Brain research on boys' preference for video games and girls' for social media - <AUTHOR> https://www.wsj.com/articles/girls-vs-boys-brain-differences-might-explain-tech-behaviors-11569317402 <comment><USER2> If you comment in this thread, please stick to the specifics of the article.

This thread got bogged down on its first go, but the article is interesting enough to deserve a second chance.

</comment><comment><USER3> [http://archive.is/YRQwS](http://archive.is/YRQwS)

<comment><USER4> FWIW, that link does some weird stuff to the charts for me.

</comment></comment><comment><USER5> IMHO a big part of "controversy" surrounding the idea of purely biological male vs. female predispositions comes from people not really understanding how statistics work. People feel that results like this are somehow limiting to them individually so they argue emotionally against it, but statistics don't really deal with the individual outcomes. Statistical researches are never about you, me or any single individual. Just because on average sexes seem to prefer different things doesn't mean that every and single person of that sex has to feel that way, there will always be a spectrum of different results on the individual level. It's like saying that males are taller than females, that doesn't imply that there's no short men, or very tall women, we all know that there's a lot of them.

Now, that said, I personally don't buy neither just "everything is predefined by biology", nor the "the society shapes everything" positions, both seem like crude over-simplifications.

<comment><USER6> And yet...

I've read this[1] yesterday on a complete unrelated topic, and I must say that "I don't buy" it's another form of not understanding statistics.

Biology is what it is and controls major aspects of our lives.

If you can be stronger of some of the biological instincts, good, but statistically biology always wins.

We can say for example that "women prefer laudanum, men prefer opium and pronstitues" is 100% a social construction.

"Women are better at social activities while men are better at competitive activities" much less so.

> Like most psychologists who study personality, Peterson believes there are > five core personality traits—extraversion, agreeableness, openness, > conscientiousness and neuroticism—and that these traits are universal across > most cultures. The taxonomy is also gendered. For example, women tend to be > more agreeable than men. The traits have both biological and cultural > origins and, as Peterson is fond of saying, the biological factors > __maximize in places—like Scandinavia—that have strenuously tried to flatten > out the cultural differences __. Biology is, therefore, in a sense, > __destiny __, no matter how much people may want to deny it. To his mind, > arguing that gender is a social construct or a kind of performance or—as the > Ontario Human Rights Code says—an individual's subjective experience is just > wrong. "It's not an alternative hypothesis," Peterson says. "It's an > incorrect hypothesis.

\-- Jordan Bernt Peterson is a Canadian clinical psychologist and a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.

[1] [https://torontolife.com/city/u-t-professor-sparked- vicious-b...](https://torontolife.com/city/u-t-professor-sparked-vicious- battle-gender-neutral-pronouns/)

<comment><USER7> Please don't use JP as a reliable source. He is extremely subjective and pushes many ideologies in his "non fiction" takes.

<comment><USER8> He is professor of psychology who taught in top universities, his scientific articles have many citations, why wouldn't he be reliable? As far as I'm concerned he is as reliable as whole field of psychology - there can be multiple competitive theories, but you can't reject his just because you happen to not like them.

<comment><USER9> As a counterpoint, consider Peter Duesberg ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesberg](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Duesberg)), a world expert on viruses, who denies that the virus HIV causes AIDS. The reason we can reject this claim is that (unlike his previous work) it's totally unsupported by any evidence, counter to high quality evidence from large numbers of mainstream science.

<comment><USER10> The way to make a counterpoint is not to bring up someone else and say "this other guy's claim is unsupported by evidence."

Instead, you'd do this by showing how Peterson's claim is unsupported by evidence, specifically on how his view pertains to the current topic.

<comment><USER9> My counterpoint is apt; it points out that even people who have credentials can be wrong, and it's important to consider that.

<comment><USER10> Hitton's point is that "you can't reject [Peterson] just because you happen to not like them." If it was instead "because his claims are unsupported by evidence," then I could see how your counterpoint is apt. However, that is not the case.

<comment><USER9> I was responding to "He is professor of psychology who taught in top universities, his scientific articles have many citations, why wouldn't he be reliable?", not "because his claims are unsupported by evidence".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> Here is one of the actual studies, which is much less annoying to read: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6234325/?mod=ar...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6234325/?mod=article_inline)

I was particularly interested in the participant selection section; they did go to an effort to select male and female participants with similar gaming habits. However, this doesn't mean that the only explanation for the different "craving" response is a fundamental difference between men and women. Just because you end up with a similar population with similar habits, doesn't mean that the path those individuals traveled to get there is the same.

As an example of how the observed differences could still be due to nurture rather than nature, suppose that across all young boys and girls, there is a subset of people that are predisposed to addiction. Also suppose that in many cases, an addiction can begin the first time you're exposed to something. Even if both boys and girls were equally predisposed to become addicted to both video games and social media, they would not be equally likely to be exposed to those two addictive digital activities. It would be more likely that a boy's friends would introduce him to video games, and that a girl's friends would introduce her to social media. Once they are addicted to one or the other, they will spend more time on that activity, and will be unlikely to explore the opposite.

Eventually, these hypothetical boys and girls grow up, and our hypothetical scientists select participants for their version of this fMRI experiment. They do a good job selecting male and female participants who play games for similar numbers of hours, but the potential female video game addicts in this universe are much less likely to ever start playing games, before getting addicted to something else. Since these hypothetical people have selected themselves out of this hypothetical study, they discover a difference in fMRI responses to images of video games that's correlated with gender, but still 100% caused by existing gender roles and stereotypes.

<comment><USER12> This argument is superficially compelling but I fear that it is ultimately argument from ignorance. It is true that we don't know everything. You even offer a fairly elaborate example of something that we don't know whether it happened or not. It could be true. The problem here is that you offer no evidence to support whether it is true or not. Now it's story time and instead of evaluating the studies and working with a minimal conclusion supported by the evidence, the task becomes telling the better story.

<comment><USER13> The whole point for randomized trials, and much of modern statistics is to argue from ignorance. You hypothesize that maybe there's something missing, who knows. A causal boogey man. Then you design a test robust to that. One term for problems this leads to is omitted variable bias. It's not about "ooh maybe this one thing is bad." It's about "this class of problem is introduced."

It's tough to make an intuitive story for why RCTs are important, so the story sounds elaborate. You don't need to offer evidence against the theory to say that the methodology is weak.

Anyways, wet streets might cause rain.

<comment><USER12> Argument from ignorance is a specific kind of logical fallacy. It's where you argue for something by saying, in effect, "we don't know that it's not true".

If a hypothesis leads you to test for something and collect (dis)confirming evidence, And your argument hinges on the evidence, then we aren't arguing from ignorance.

<comment><USER13> It seems like you're saying "this is weak methodology" is a fallacy. It's open to all sorts of errors, but since we don't know that any of the errors are really the case, so we shouldn't argue that it's bad evidence? We aren't arguing boolean true/false, but strength of evidence.

<comment><USER12> There are many ways to argue for something like "this is weak methodology" and some of them are fallacies. Some of them aren't.

A good argument against a study's methodology would probably talk a lot more about the methodology, and a lot less about a believable alternative narrative that is supported by the study. The latter strategy is accepting of the methodology because it is granting that the observed effect is real and deserving of explanation. In a different light, the earlier comment ("As an example of how the observed differences could still be due to nurture rather than nature...") is kind of weird because it is as though the effect might as well be due to nature -- it would present the same way and be as consistent and robust -- even if it were due to socialisation.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER14> The article claims that inside games "most communication is through text". This makes me think they haven't seen very many real gamers. There's no mention of voice chat's extensive use inside games for everything from gameplay to homework advice from buddies. Pretty clueless.

<comment><USER15> In higher level competitive scenarios, yeah voice is predominant. However, that is by no means the majority. They only seem like a bigger segment of gamers because they're loud and make themselves known. All they said was that most is done through text, which is true

<comment><USER16> Even nearly 20 years ago I was hanging out daily on voice chat servers with my Counter-Strike buddies.

It wasn't just for coordination in-game, just hanging out and talking while sometimes not even playing, because that's what even male friends do: They talk.

It's even more dominant with consoles where since the 360/PS3 era voice has also seen quite high adoption rates even more common than in PC gaming.

Then there's Discord which is very much the millennial version of "hanging out in IRC all day" culture combining text and voice chat.

<comment><USER17> Firstly, you're talking about CS which is one of few games where voice chat is more of the norm. Whats funny is that I still to this day get stuck in pugs with half the team not having mics. For console games like COD, most causal games I played few people had mics. But what we are talking about is competitive games more or less which does generally get more attention than Viva Piñata or something like that. And, if you look at something like LoL or Dota2 voice chat is either non-existent or no one uses it. I have ran into so few people using their mics in Dota2 and that is a competitive game. Instead people ping or type in chat.

When I played MMORPGs, which I think we can all agree are pretty popular, very few people had mics. For WoW people would connect to Vent but most didn't have a mic. It was useful for raids, but most of the time communication was via text chat. When playing MapleStory I would sit on Vent with my friends who often played on entirely different servers and no one on that game actually used Vent or TS regularly as part of their daily grind, it was almost exclusively chat.

So, I think the assertion that voice chat is a minority is probably correct. And like you said Discord is beyond a voice chat for gaming. I am in plenty of Discord channels and I have never once entered into a voice chat with anyone. It's a community chat room that _happens_ to offer a voice chat option. Plenty of people use voice chat while gaming, but I don't think it's by and large the majority.

<comment><USER16> > Firstly, you're talking about CS which is one of few games where voice chat > is more of the norm.

For close to 20 years, as such, it's hardly something new. That's just how communities organized back then: Around clans and servers.

Matchmaking killed a lot of that, but the clan structure helps retain some of it. That's something a whole lot of people, particularly younger ones, participate to this day without ever fully going "pro" because there's a pretty massive middle ground between "absolutely casual gaming" and "sponsored organized pro gaming".

> For console games like COD, most causal games I played few people had mics.

Did you actually play with friends? There's a reason "party chat" features like Xbox Live Party were heavily demanded for many years.

> When I played MMORPGs, which I think we can all agree are pretty popular, > very few people had mics. For WoW people would connect to Vent but most > didn't have a mic.

That's completely opposite to my experience in vanilla Wow: Organizing and managing 40 man raids without voice chat was pretty much impossible.

Just like daily guild live mostly happened on a voice chat server, where people would hang out even when they were not playing.

> So, I think the assertion that voice chat is a minority is probably correct. > And like you said Discord is beyond a voice chat for gaming.

If you define voice chat as solely "voice chat interactions with randoms in public rounds" then maybe yes, but your mileage will vary vastly depending on the platform and genre.

Discord also isn't "beyond a voice chat for gaming", it's pretty much just the modern manifestation of server centered communities like they used to be a thing with CS game servers and still are a thing to this day with "Clan TS2 servers", Discord is just a natural evolution of those where people don't have to pay rent/bandwidth for a server.

<comment><USER17> > For close to 20 years, as such, it's hardly something new. That's just how > communities organized back then: Around clans and servers.

CS is not new, but it's one game. And even within this one game, many people do not have mics. Most people don't play exclusively with pre-mades they play pugs. Either via MM or Faceit (and to a lesser extent these days, ESEA). If you pug you'll find most people don't use mics at all.

> Matchmaking killed a lot of that, but the clan structure helps retain some > of it. That's something a whole lot of people, particularly younger ones, > participate to this day without ever fully going "pro" because there's a > pretty massive middle ground between "absolutely casual gaming" and > "sponsored organized pro gaming".

Most people don't play in clans or pre-mades like I said before. Yes, the move visible players do use voice chat, and at the highest levels it's uncommon for people to not use it. But a bulk of players in CS do not fall into these categories whatsoever. The average ranking is Gold Nova-ish which is far from the top end of the player base.

> Did you actually play with friends? There's a reason "party chat" features > like Xbox Live Party were heavily demanded for many years.

Yes, I played in a clan starting in MW2 - BO2 or MW3 (I forget which came out last) and plenty of my clan members didn't have mics during clan events, let alone just playing random games. This was on Playstation Network, so maybe Xbox players used this way more, I can't speak to that.

> That's completely opposite to my experience in vanilla Wow: Organizing and > managing 40 man raids without voice chat was pretty much impossible.

I guess this depends on how dedicated your groups were. We had 40 people in voice chat, but really only the party leaders regularly had mics in Vent or TS. This was enough to organize and successfully raid. But I guess YMMV here. All other MMOs I've played voice chat was essentially non-existent and you chatted with random people more often anyways since you didn't need pre-made parties or your guild to do most of the events. Using MapleStory (since I played the shit out of that) Party Quests were almost always just randoms in channel 1 not your friends. This echos the experiences I had playing Eve and Rift when that came out.

> Discord also isn't "beyond a voice chat for gaming", it's pretty much just > the modern manifestation of server centered communities like they used to be > a thing with CS game servers and still are a thing to this day with "Clan > TS2 servers", Discord is just a natural evolution of those where people > don't have to pay rent/bandwidth for a server.

Discord isn't used exclusively for in game chat in my experience. I'm part of plenty of communities on discord that have nothing to do with gaming, and even the gaming communities don't focus around chatting while gaming. They are usually to keep up with whatever the community is focused on, be it a streamers Discord or whatever. I'm not saying that Discord isn't used similar to TS or Ventrilo but it's beyond what those services did, and they aren't dedicated to just voice chatting with your group. It's a far more versatile service.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER18> Imagine if this headline read "Research on drunks' preference for aggressiveness and sobers' for politeness". Would anyone argue that nurture and societal norms is the reason drunks behave more aggressively ?

As someone who has been drunk on testosterone most of their life, I can testify it is a powerful and fun drug. Perhaps if research was framed in terms of hormonal differences rather than sex differences it wouldn't be as intrinsically controversial.

<comment><USER19> It shouldn't be controversial at all. There are sex differences. A good chunk of those differences are the effect of hormonal differences that stem from sexual dimorphism that in turn likely stem from some other evolutionary selection process.

Does culture play a role in behavior? Probably. But is there an inherent difference between the sexes? Yes.

<comment><USER20> In the nature vs nurture debate, every time someone argues for all nature or all nurture it's an ideological position. That biology has no influence on behavior is as absurd as that society has none. The division into nature and nurture is also not as clean-cut as people think it is. There are many things in human culture that are that way because of biology and our culture influences our biology over the long run.

<comment><USER21> Plus unless the person arguing is a biologist backed by some hard evidence, it is only ideology talking.

<comment><USER22> Unless it's James Watson, then shut him up, fire him, and take all his awards away.

Plenty of biologists see what happens, and toe the line so they can keep their lives and pay their mortgages.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER23> All of the games I played as a kid were clearly designed for boys and young men (featuring all of the typical things like guns and heavy machinery that men are well known to like more than women). That's just how the market was. If it's like that today, then it is no wonder that boys exhibit signs of enjoying video games more.

<comment><USER24> There are plenty of games "for girls" (the hidden-object and life-simulation genres are almost exclusively consumed by women, regardless of theming) but they're not marketed with quite the high-budget superbowl ad-campaign effort that games "for boys" are.

I've encountered the situation many times where I'll find out one of my female friends doesn't play video games. I'll ask why, and—disregarding the people who just don't like to spend time cooped up indoors—it'll usually end out that she's just never been introduced to a game she's enjoyed. Upon introducing her to a game or two in the genres more traditionally targeted at women, she'll be just about as likely as any of my male friends to gradually evolve from there into an avid gamer: one for whom "gaming" is now counted among their serious hobbies; one who might be excited to dedicate a weekend to full "hardcore" engagement with a new game.

In other words, for these ladies, it was 100% a market education problem: the companies making these products weren't managing to make their target audience aware of them.

<comment><USER25> According to some random infographic¹, over 60% of the mobile gaming demographic is female. This kind of game is absolutely being advertised during the Super Bowl. They're just not on the radar of "hardcore" gamers who tend to look down on console and especially mobile players.

¹[https://mediakix.com/blog/mobile-gaming-industry- statistics-...](https://mediakix.com/blog/mobile-gaming-industry-statistics- market-revenue/)

<comment><USER24> I didn't want to get into it, but I would like to make a distinction, that I hope should be obvious in retrospect, and is different from the usual "casual"/"hardcore" distinction:

Some people _play games_ ; but some other people are only _addicted to spending money on slot machines_. The kind of mobile "game" you see Super Bowl ads (or, really, any TV ads) for are almost exclusively actually just slot machines at their core, with any game mechanics being tacked-on afterthoughts.

(If you wouldn't let your own children play a given "game", and your intuitive reasoning is the same as why you wouldn't let them wander freely in a casino—then you probably should mark such titles down under the "casino" tally, not the "games" tally, no?)

Importantly, the audiences for these two types of... _experiences_ , let's call them—are mostly non-overlapping sets of people. Plenty of people are addicted to these slot-machine apps but would never play an actual "game", no matter how casual it was. They're not in it for game-mechanical "fun"; they're in it for variable-scheduled dopaminergic rewards. And, vice-versa, the more of an experienced "gamer" someone is—the more actual _games_ they've played (where even FarmVille with all its dark patterns is still a _game_ )—the more they'll have a taste for actual _fun_ brought about by game mechanics, and so the more clearly they can intuitively feel that these slot-machine apps aren't providing such "fun."

Once you take these slot-machine non-games and their mostly non-gamer audiences out of consideration, then things do line up the way I described: there are no game companies targeting women bothering to spend much on advertising.

(There are, however, plenty of games _without_ gendered targeting that have AAA ad spend. Pokemon, for example.)

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> Here's one of the studies quoted, centring on adolescents' propensity towards getting addicted to online games: [https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6234325/?mod=ar...](https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6234325/?mod=article_inline).

These studies don't claim to say anything deeper about either gender's innate predisposition towards certain behaviours, only that the populations they studied behave in particular ways.

The data should be used to focus efforts in things like, for example, preventing online gaming addiction or preventing feelings of inadequacy from using social media, but I think it's folly to extrapolate the findings to make any larger scale statements on society at large.

</comment><comment><USER27> Viewing the initial question from a perspective of social status the answers the article makes have pretty simple answers. Males competing between other males in video games and win gains a perceived gain in social status, so when they put down the game and face others around them there is a natural clash as the social status gain is seen nor recognized by the social environment outside the game. Aggression is common in most societies as the cultural accepted method to defend social status, so from outside it look like video games make males aggressive.

Females compete for social status more on social media, and thus social gains and losses occur on their mobile phone. As a result it look like social media cause females to become aggressive (with the cultural methods of aggressiveness that is appropriate in a given society).

With this perspective we get the exact behavior that the article highlight with no difference in brains. Same brain pathways, same biological reaction, just two different social status competitions (females vs females, males vs males) and two different cultural accepted behaviors when it comes to defending social status.

<comment><USER28> Where do you think those differences in social status competitions originate from if not from brain differences?

<comment><USER27> If we take a look at the animal kingdom, females compete for social status over other females in order to get the best males, and males compete for social status over other males in order to get the best females. Both does this in order to get the best offspring as part of evolution and natural selection. You get differences when there is a difference in investment during the reproduction, like egg and sperm.

Looking at humans it obvious also that there is a strong cultural aspect to it. In one culture the apex male attribute to reach the top of the social status ladder would be to go into the jungle and kill a lion with nothing but a spear. In an other it is to have the title of CEO and have a high number listed in a bank account. Both is about a social status hierarchy, but with very different method for competition.

Going back to the article, a man gains social status if he display superiority over other males in a video game. Why? Video games represent physical games which represent competition of strength and skills. We can imagine a culture where that would not gain any social status and then any association with aggressiveness would go away. No brain surgery required.

<comment><USER23> > _In one culture the apex male attribute to reach the top of the social > status ladder would be to go into the jungle and kill a lion with nothing > but a spear. In an other it is to have the title of CEO and have a high > number listed in a bank account._

These are very similar from a behavioral perspective because they both involve aggression and risk-seeking.

<comment><USER29> No. Inheritance plays a larger role in becoming a successful CEO/"professional" than it would in hunting a lion. The biggest lie Americans tell themselves is that the wealthy got wealthy by "taking risks" and that they deserve their wealth.

What takes more risk: having large amounts of capital accumulate wealth over time due or switching between multiple jobs, working longer hours, and being more stressed as you try to keep your family alive?

<comment><USER23> The second might be more stressful, but the first is more risky - you risk capital to make money, but getting paid is a direct exchange of hours for dollars.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER30> The original (more clicky baity) said "brain differences", which really isn't born out by the article. It seems highly likely that these preferences are socially constructed. I have two kids under the age of 10, and both play video games with the same fervor & intensity. Neither are allowed on social media yet. (yes, that's a sample size of 1, so it's hardly authoritative, just a case-in-point)

Also, at least some of the preference males have for videogames over females is that a majority are designed & marketed with a male audience in mind.

<comment> seph-reed > two kids under the age of 10

I think puberty might have more of a splitting effect on the human mind than anyone is saying.

Also, food for thought, humanity as a whole is probably still way too primitive to have a greater nurture than nature ratio. If you look back, primitive people appear to be more nature than people now. Looking forwards, it's probably going to continue. Therefor, we must be somewhere in between, and I get the feeling we're still pretty green.

</comment></comment><comment><USER31> Anecdotal:

I'm female and I like playing city building games and puzzle games, like Tetris or match three games. My sons have introduced me to games like Master of Magic by saying "It's like your favorite: SimCity" and then helping me relate to it as a civilization building game, downplaying the fighty aspects.

Longer version of that anecdote here:

[https://momturnedgamer.blogspot.com/p/about.html](https://momturnedgamer.blogspot.com/p/about.html)

I think my point is that gendered expectations can be overcome to some degree, especially if you have allies who aren't invested in keeping you stuck in a particular role. Generally speaking, men who were romantically interested in me have failed to be that kind of ally.

Not how I wanted it, mind you.

</comment><comment><USER32> You sort of have to be willfully ignorant to avoid acknowledging the things vs people dichotomy.

</comment><comment><USER33> I know the mods hate when we complain about paywalls. But I f __king hate paywalls.

</comment><comment><USER34> A super uneducated guess here would be that boys choose more to participate in skills-based competition and girls gravitate more towards relationship-based communal activities?

<comment><USER35> aka things vs people?

</comment></comment><comment><USER36> What a weird study. I mean gaming is very social, a huge presence in many blocs of social medias

</comment><comment><AUTHOR> FWIW when I posted it 40 minutes ago I linked to an unpaywalled full-length version on [http://archive.is/](http://archive.is/). Gotta be fast, I guess.

<comment><USER2> It's not ok to post a copy of an article from a completely unrelated domain; it's important that the site name that shows up next to the title be the original source.

If you have a link to another source, it's ok to post that in the comments.

</comment></comment><comment><USER37> Any version of this sans paywall?

<comment><USER38> [http://archive.is/xsV4e](http://archive.is/xsV4e)

</comment></comment><comment><USER39> Aren't the majority of gamers female anyway? [0]

[0] [https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/52-per...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/sep/18/52-percent- people-playing-games-women-industry-doesnt-know)

<comment><USER2> Could you please not post in the flamewar style to HN?

Also, going on about getting downvoted breaks the site guidelines. If you'd please review [https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html](https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html) and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd be grateful.

<comment><USER39> Alright I'll remove the snark. The question still stands though

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> This article should not be flagged: it's a good-faith article written by journalist that cites its sources (which include a number of peer-reviewed studies). It is careful to use conditional language in the title ("Might explain"). Even if you don't like the conclusion, if you are an honest person who truly believes that science can help us understand the nature of humanity and use it to explain our current situation, you should not flag the article.

</comment><comment><USER40> It was posted on here 6 minutes ago and has already been flagged.

<comment><USER38> Make sure to vouch for it to cancel out the mass-flagging.

<comment><USER9> How do I do that?

<comment><USER38> Under the title, there should be a link that says "vouch".

<comment><USER9> I don't see such an option. I turned on "showdead", but that seems to be for "dead" posts, not "flagged" ones.

Well, either way, hopefully the mods will come by and recognize the legimitimacy of the post.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER41> The author should go to India and see the space program. Might offer a different perspective. I myself coming from an Asian country have seen many girl study engineering. It is considered a carier path and nothing more. There is no stigma attached.

<comment><USER23> In poorer countries there tend to be more female engineers because engineering is a good career for anyone (including women), and in poorer countries, having a good career is proportionally more important. The prevalence of female engineers in India is frequently used as support for the natural preference theory.

<comment><USER42> To add to this, in countries with low equality and weak social safety nets, having a lucrative career is far more important for survival. It's western countries where women are more free to choose a career based on interest.

<comment><USER41> This cannot be a correct assumption. In western countries also most Enginnering jobs pay well above what other female-dominated (medical care) jobs offer. Then why don't select these well-paying jobs over ones that don't pay as much?

<comment><USER43> Because their survival is not dependent on their career choice. Tech may pay more, but being a nurse is still perfectly fine. There are also more women entering the MD profession than men, and that pays better than tech, so there's even more room for people to move between fields based on a "natural" preference (if such a thing exists).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER10> Is there a way to design the flag mechanism so that quality articles do not die even though they are polarizing?

<comment><USER38> In theory, the mods can whitelist those articles manually after seeing them repeatedly flagged and vouched for.

However, we know that the mods have already seen this article since the link was changed from the archive to the paywall URL. In addition, I believe they've said in the past that they want to discourage particularly controversial stories. And biology studies like this are unfortunately controversial to the general public these days.

<comment><USER9> I agree with your assessment; I believe the site admins are intentionally not unflagging this article to avoid controversy. It would be nice if they could come out and say that directly.

<comment><USER2> Not true. I only just saw this and have turned off the flags. The main problem from my perspective is that the thread has filled up with completely off topic comments about flagging and a lot of inaccurate meta stuff.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER44> Why is this flagged+dead?

<comment><USER45> Because people who say they believe in science have a really hard time accepting the cognitive dissonance that arises when science contradicts their beliefs. Windows shutdown sound plays and they flag it.

<comment><USER44> Oh right, I forgot flagging is done by the community.

Addendum: I can kinda understand it though. While research like this might be correct and is definitely important, it can make it sound like "all men" or "all women" think this way, to some extent, making those who are different feel invalid. (Maybe a bit of a personal topic but I'm currently thinking a lot about my gender and identity and stuff like this is kinda making me scared.)

Additionally, to some this might make it seem like it's not worth welcoming diversity in tech. (Which is also not true IMO.)

<comment><USER40> > not worth welcoming diversity in tech.

It doesn't even suggest that. It just suggests that, no matter how many initiatives you put into place, you're never going to be able to achieve demographic "purity".

<comment><USER44> I know. I'm saying it may sound like that to some people causing a knee jerk reaction of denial.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Let's see how long this stays online

<comment><USER38> Looks like it's already dead on HN.

<comment><USER47> Just landed on the front page

<comment><USER40> And deleted just as fast.</comment></comment></comment></comment>