Author: Bob McElrath 2015-12-19 19:30:45
Published on: 2015-12-19T19:30:45+00:00
The issue of block withholding attacks has been raised by pools, which are receiving legitimate threats from bad actors who could use this method against them. According to Peter Todd, the only other possible bad actors are other miners. P2Pool is often suggested as a replacement for pools, but it is still relatively vulnerable to block withholding and has many other vulnerabilities and technical issues that have prevented widespread adoption. The economic situation where miners can be deprived of profit due to the lack of synchronicity in block updates is stated to be a physics problem due to the size of the Earth and will never be removed. However, a different, more comprehensive solution is called for. Bob McElrath proposes a long-term solution that fundamentally removes the source of contention and fixes the design flaw while remaining as close "in spirit" to bitcoin as possible. The dis-incentive against withholding blocks in terms of the "cohort difficulty" is explicitly added to discourage block withholding. Other graph-theoretic quantities are also possible in the reward function to better align the incentives of miners with the correct operation of the system. By lowering the target difficulty and increasing the block (bead) rate, one lowers the variance of miner income. There has been some interest in testing the proposed ideas in p2pool itself or a new similar share pool, but there are complaints about p2pool's vulnerabilities and technical issues.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T02:31:30.504468+00:00