Hiya, long time Decred holder here with a question regarding a potential social attack on the coin. On a Twitter post somebody said - "What matters is if the Decred design can resist attacks, like social attacks. I don't think it can" Question 1. What exactly is a social attack. Question 2. What would one look like on Decred? Question 3. What do you think the poster means when he says he doesn't think Decred can resist a social attack? As I said above, I really like Decred but it's important for all holders to look at any potential negatives and problems that could arise in the future. Thanks.
hey IMO I think they mean social engineering or attacks by propaganda/rhetoric, which confuses and divides the community. Prime example would be what Segwit2x or Roger Ver did It could be done on any contentious/controversial decision like blocksize change/dev subsidy/tail emission of unreleased coins due to missed votes. Point is that it doesn't matter what the topic is, all you need is propaganda & rhetoric. I think i agree with whoever said that but a key difference between any other coin and Decred is that due to PoW/PoS hybrid there will be no threat of a "chain fork". Yes it can't be prevented and yes there will be drama, trolling & all that comes with it but it will result only in a forkcoin by forking of code repository, much like Bitcoin Cash, not a threat of fork in the blockchain. Both chains can have a shared history but there will never be a threat of main chain forking or reorging like it happened with ETH & ETC.
I would argue that Decred is _more_ resistant to "social attack", propaganda on Twitter or even an attempt to convince the public by spinning thousands of nodes "supporting" some change. What matters most in Decred is what ticket holders vote. Imagine how silly a Twitter propaganda would look after the real voting result is the opposite. If this were to happen it would reveal Twitter sockpuppets who have no skin in the game.
i would agree that yes there are less incentives in decred for such attacks but if they think they can profit enough by creating an association with decred's reputation & dupe enough people to follow them then they will try to do what Bitcoin Cash did, a code fork with enough "followers". That battle was won by education & fighting the propaganda everywhere, same will be needed for decred, again just that there will be no threat of a chain fork.
Thanks guys, perfectly explained. Personally I think the fake news term has done wonders re EDUCATION, ie has forced many people to start thinking or at least questioning 'am I being played here'? And if they believe they are, to start doing some more digging to further educate themselves on the topic(s). Yes, there's a lot of crap on the internet but with careful consideration anyone can find the good posters/information/projects/ideas etc.
It's starting to make a lot more sense now. I've just read a Reddit post by Lead c0 DCR Dev where he was talking about the controversial Ticket Price Algorithm Vote. He made this point - "Imagine if you have a community of 500,000 participants. Then, further imagine that only 2% of them are against a change and are passionate about it and post on social media two to three times every day, and maybe only 1% are actively posting in favor. That would result in something like 30,000 to 45,000 posts every day, giving the appearance that something is massively controversial and "nobody" wants the change, because there would be roughly twice as many con posts than pro posts." I suppose it's no different with many things now, politics, business, sports - everything is at risk from a well organised social attack.
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