Author: Peter Todd 2015-12-20 13:28:43
Published on: 2015-12-20T13:28:43+00:00
The discussion is about block withholding attacks in the hashing/mining ecosystem, specifically Ittay Eyal's paradoxical discovery that an attacking pool (A) can use some of its hashpower to mine on behalf of a victim pool (B) and make more money from the attack than it would if it used 100% of its hashpower for its own mining. While there are techniques to detect block withholding attacks, they may not be effective against savvy attackers who could register servers under different people's names and tunnel them through VPNs. KYC measures and DRM tech could prevent such attacks but would remove anonymity of hashing power, which is not desirable. Infiltrating big pools by indiscriminately signing up miners and peeling off some of their hashpower would put pressure on them to stop signing up people and not grow too big. However, this would lead to a situation where new hashing power cannot be brought online except in large quantities, which is not positive for the ecosystem. One specific suggestion by Luke-Jr is to have the pool pick a secret k for each share, commit to H(k) in the share, and change the PoW validity rule from H(block header).
Updated on: 2023-06-11T02:31:48.227106+00:00