Author: Luv Khemani 2015-08-17 11:18:08
Published on: 2015-08-17T11:18:08+00:00
The author of an email to the bitcoin-dev mailing list is concerned about the capacity of miners to handle smaller blocks. The author notes that while half a million dollars in revenue may seem like a lot, it means little if running costs are also high. The author points out that there have been instances where miners have been struggling to download and validate much smaller blocks, leading to empty blocks being mined despite non-trivial elapsed time from the previous block. The author suggests that this could be due to bad mining codes or laziness on the part of miners. The author is particularly worried about the implications of miners resorting to SPV mining, as this could lead to disastrous consequences in the event of a malicious miner mining an invalid block on purpose. This could cause reorgs and many block orphans for anyone not running a full node, which would be especially problematic in the XT world where Mike wants everyone to be running SPV nodes. If these pools go out of business, it would lead to even more mining centralization which is already too centralized today. The author calls for representatives of these pools to comment on why this is happening and whether they are on Matt's relay network.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T20:04:16.910892+00:00