Author: Chris Priest 2015-12-20 03:43:59
Published on: 2015-12-20T03:43:59+00:00
During the Scaling Bitcoin conference in Hong Kong, one of the issues raised by pool representatives was block withholding attacks. Pools are receiving legitimate threats by bad actors threatening to use block withholding attacks against them. This is a threat to the decentralization of hashing power as without pools only fairly large hashing power installations are profitable as variance is a very real business expense. Fixing block withholding requires a SPV-visible hard fork. Matt Corallo pointed out that Peter Todd was referring to pool-block-withholding, not selfish mining. Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer have argued that block witholding attacks are a good thing, as in their model they can be used by small pools against larger pools, disincentivizing large pools.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T02:28:52.306491+00:00