https://www.usenix.org/conference/woot16/workshop-program/presentation/wustrow

PDF here

woot16-paper-wustrow

Stone age, Bronze age, Iron age, Steam age, Nuclear age, Space age, Internet age.

These ages should be familiar to us, they represent changes in society and civilization due to changes in technology. A new age has begun, the Troll age. The internet gave the average person a voice that could be heard (or rather read) all over the world. The playing field was never level and due to the nature of the technology, the control of the internet centralized.

Government censorship,  major corporations, and media companies, shills all should sought to stifle and derail debate. This control was all centralized and relied on hubs  in a network to control thought itself.

Then it all changed.

Trolls; be they pranksters, devils advocates, malicious individuals, or just individuals having a different opinion and just as insistent as you, well they have always existed. Now trolls may have one of the most powerful destabilizing tools conceived of; DDosCoin

Ever hear of Bitcoin? Dogecoin? Bitcoin was conceived of after a technical paper published in 2008. Three months later a working wallet was created and then 7 years later every one new about Bitcoin. Bitcoin has become a significant and somewhat irksome for centralized  banking.

DDoSCoin operates in a similar way to Bitcoin but rather than solving a innocuous mathematical puzzle to award Bitcoin to miners, DDosCoin rewards proof of DOS (Denial of service, a malicious attack against an internet server). It was claimed Australia’s 2016 census was subject to s DDOS attack but it was most likely the result of shoddy planning and too few census severs.

The Hashrate (measure of computational power) of Bitcoin the Bitcoin is impressive. Imagine a hashrate of Bitcoin directed against the hubs of internet control. This is the threat of DDosCoin. Why stand outside Monsanto with a cardboard sign in the rain waiting for OC spray, when you could just click a few buttons at home and join a DDOS attack against Monsanto and have a picnic at the beach (or what ever else you were planning). Best of all rather than expending your precious time to protest you would be fianacially rewarded for your participation. It goes without saying one would need to have good OPSEC (aka being clever and covering your tracks). DDosCoin does not exist yet as a publicly available application yet, but it will, whether the inventors want it to or not. Its possible other people may have something in the works now or be inspired by the technical paper. One thing is certain DDosCoin will exist, and the future will not be the same again. The mighty may fall and be replaced by the troll, someone with the audacity to say, no I disagree and you can’t shut me up.

Be alert not alarmed.

Artists impression of what a DDosCoin could look like in the real world.