Author: Jannes Faber 2015-12-21 11:39:40
Published on: 2015-12-21T11:39:40+00:00
The discussion revolves around block withholding attacks and their potential effectiveness against large mining pools. Peter Todd mentions that there are techniques to detect such attacks, but they are kept secret to avoid being avoided by attackers. Emin Gün Sirer points out that weak measures are unlikely to be effective against savvy attackers. KYC regulations can be used to prevent block withholding attacks, but it may lead to removal of anonymity of hashing power, which would not be a positive development for the ecosystem. DRM technology can also be used to prevent block withholding attacks by attesting to the honesty of the hashing power, ensuring that a remote node is indeed running the code that it purports to be running. This technology has several benefits for the ecosystem, including getting rid of cloud hashing scams. Miner's Dilemma (MD) attacks are quite effective, and the loss of the biggest open pools would not be a bad outcome as they pose a danger. There are solo miners out there who can attack the big open pools, and pools >25% pose a danger, but home miners don't need a pool >25% for protection against variance. The conversation ends with Peter Todd mentioning a specific suggestion from Luke-Jr regarding changing the PoW validity rule, but Emin Gün Sirer points out that this would require a change to the Bitcoin PoW and could re-enable the painful days of the GHash-at-51% situation.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T02:33:07.575272+00:00