Author: jl2012 at xbt.hk 2015-08-17 09:15:15
Published on: 2015-08-17T09:15:15+00:00
The bandwidth and validating capacity of the global mining network is causing concern for bitcoin developers. Despite having all the incentives, miners are still struggling to download and validate small blocks. This is proven by empty blocks mined despite a non-trivial elapsed time from the previous block. The most glaring case is Block 370057, where despite 73 seconds elapsing and the preceding block being a mere 131KB, the miner was unable to download/validate fast enough to include transactions in their block. If miners are SPV mining for a whole minute for just fall apart as a significant portion of the hashing power SPV mines throughout. This could lead to disastrous consequences if a single malicious miner mines an invalid block on purpose and lets these pools SPV mine on top of them while it mines a valid block free of their competition. It could impact reorgs and many block orphans for anyone not running a full node, which could be disastrous, especially more so in the XT world where Mike wants everyone to be running SPV nodes.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T20:03:43.233446+00:00