RE: Fact: Steemit Sybil Attacked the Steem Blockchain
In a Sybil attack, the attacker subverts the reputation system of a network service by creating a large number of pseudonymous identities and uses them to gain a disproportionately large influence. It is named after the subject of the book Sybil, a case study of a woman diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder.
Are you claiming the 20 witnesses pushed into consensus by a single individual were not "pseudonymous identities" but known, trusted members of the community voluntarily put into a position of leadership by the community according to the intended design of DPoS?
STEEM, clearly, is not Sybil resistant enough. This was a Sybil attack. Pretending otherwise is not defensible. If noganoo had enough stake (or enough influence to get exchanges to do what they did), he could attack the chain through this Sybil strategy just the same.
Creating 20 new accounts didn't give them more influence in the network. Their stake was already there. A sybil attack is when creating more and more accounts will give you more and more power in the network. Imagine a 1 acc = 1 vote democratic system, this wouldn't be sybil resistant, as creating more and more accounts would lead to you having more and more voting power. On steem everything is based on stake alone, creating more accounts doesn't give you any advantage whatsoever.
There's no more or less sybil resistant, it's binary, black or white.
Hope you see my point. I overall agree with your article though, I just think a single word you used is wrong :) What happened is more of a bribe attack (justin bribed exchanges to vote for him to control the network)
It was a bribe attack as well, and I do see your point where a fully-sybil attackable system does of course have no restrictions at all in terms of the cost of account creation and those accounts giving a single actor more vote weight. I feel you are not validating my position that the stake wasn't used just to create one witness account but directly created 20 which, according to the "sybil resistant" rules or Steem, gave them full control (or "more influence in the network" if you like) of the chain. Steem is remarkably Sybil resistant in most regards. It still got Sybil attacked because one majorly staked individual was able to act as 20 accounts. That to me is a clear Sybil attack on what should be Sybil-resistant system. We have work to fix DPoS.
I see your point, but I don't think 'owning 1 acc' as being a real limitation to your power. Justin could vote for 1 real account + 29 community witnesses and still use his power fully. Instead he did 20 dummy accounts and voted 20 times for himself. He's taking a shortcut, but essentially his total witness voting power (influence) remained the same number.
Also, you can see how making more than 20 wouldn't have changed anything. If he did that with 30, 40, 50 puppet accounts, it wouldn't optimize his strategy further.
And that would not have been a Sybil attack. He also could not take over the chain with this approach unless those 29 witnesses agreed with him. In that case, it would have been done according to the proper design of DPoS (again, not a Sybil).
Yes, he only needed 20 (technically only needed 15) to do what he wanted to do. The moment "pseudonymous identities" were used to accomplish this, it became a Sybil attack. You are a technical person who has been in this space a while and you of all people should understand this. I don't think it's at all helpful to deny what took place. What is helpful is calling it exactly what it is and figuring out how to prevent it in the future.
To your point, there are other attack vectors also demonstrated here (bribe attack, centralized custodial stake without skin in the game, etc), but the real one which broke Steem, IMO, was this Sybil attack where fake accounts were able to act as a single individual. As you say, it's supposed to be Sybil resistant. It was not in this case.
I just think we disagree on the overall definition of sybil attack. Creating 19 new accounts didn't give him extra influence in the network, because influence = stake, and their stake actually decreased from creating these new accounts.
If for you creating 20 puppet accounts is a sybil attack ... well then so be it, it won't be the first word that's butchered by laymen because of misunderstandings.
The ultimate level of "influence in the network" is full control which requires more than one account. It wasn't just creating multiple accounts that made this a Sybil attack. As you've already mentioned, Steem has fairly good protections against that attack. It's the combination of stake and creating multiple pseudonymous identities which made this attack possible and that is, to me, undeniably a Sybil attack. I'm confused why you're stuck on this point because multiple pseudonymous identities was clearly required to pull this off. Those accounts were not real people. They were one person pretending to represent 20 different entities. DPoS is designed to have individual block producers, not one producer pretending to be individual block producers. These 20 accounts may be running in the same datacenter or even the same server for all we know!
From: https://steempeak.com/dpos/@dantheman/dpos-consensus-algorithm-this-missing-white-paper
How is it "taking turns" if they are all the same person in control because of this Sybil activity pretending to be multiple, separate accounts?
The election process failed because exchanges don't have skin in the game. They didn't vote with their tokens so they don't care if it impacts the token price negatively.
I think this document didn't spend enough time on the election process as that's where this Sybil attack became a reality.
Your views are interesting. I guess I'm just an extremist when it comes down to language. I agree he managed to optimize his 'effective power' if you count it in # of blocks mined, and he earns STEEM by mining blocks.
But, it's important to remember that we have no way to verify identity on a decentralized network. It's all based on human judgement. Justin did 20 very obvious puppet accounts, using chinese numerology, because he isn't too bright. He could have used his employees names / pictures to open semi-legit nodes that he still would have controlled (like he does on TRON). Who is to say that there is/was always really 20 real node owners in the steem top 20? Maybe WitnessX is secretly controlled by WitnessY, it's impossible to prove currently because of the inavailability of a working decentralized identity tech.
That's why I won't change my definition of sybil-attack, otherwise all current systems are not sybil-resistant and the term becomes useless.
And you wouldn't consider that a form of Sybil attack? To me, that's the very definition of it, and it's not a matter of scale which determines the identity.
IMO, very few systems (if any) are sybil-resistant. Some are wide open to it, and some have some protections which can still be bypassed under extreme or unusual circumstances. Maybe it's better to release a false assumption than to claim this wasn't a sybil attack. The term, to me, is still very useful, regardless of scale employed because the identifying characteristic of a pseudonymous identity is the problem. We want distributed, decentralized systems, not centralized systems pretending to be otherwise.