Author: Hector Chu 2015-02-11 08:54:15
Published on: 2015-02-11T08:54:15+00:00
The mining of cryptocurrencies is becoming centralized towards a few pool operators, which could lead to potential issues such as holding the users hostage and changing the rules to suit themselves. To address this concern, a proposal has been made to require each miner to sign the block header prior to hashing and paying out coinbase only to the public key counterpart of the private key used to sign the block header. This solution would make it difficult for pooled hashpower to earn bitcoins illegitimately or carry out double-spending attacks without sharing their private key with the whole pool. However, this proposal would also make it challenging to form a cooperating pool of miners who may not trust each other as the block rewards will be controlled by disparate parties and not the pool operator. Only a tight clique of trusted miners would be able to form their own private pool in such an environment.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T16:46:25.695244+00:00