Author: Jorge Timón 2014-01-03 19:14:25
Published on: 2014-01-03T19:14:25+00:00
The conversation between Peter Todd and Luke-Jr was mainly focused on merged mining, its security and the vulnerability of altcoins to attackers. Todd raised concerns that any non-majority crypto-currency using merged mining is at risk of 51% attacks from attackers who can re-use existing hashing power. He argued that the value of a crypto-currency is not equal to all miners and even if attackers sell their rewards at similar prices in the market, they are losing the opportunity cost of mining the currency by attacking it. On the other hand, Luke-Jr strongly disagreed with Todd's view, stating that any non-scam altcoin is pretty safe using merged mining since any would-be attacker is going to have it in their interests to invest in the altcoin instead of attacking it. He believed that the rational decision for a non-scam altcoin is to take advantage of merged mining to get as much security as possible.Todd mentioned a merge-mined Zerocoin implementation with a 1:1 BTC/ZTC exchange rate enforced by the software, which he believed was not a scamcoin since there was a 1:1 exchange rate, and the only thing one could do with the coin was to get some privacy. However, he pointed out that inevitably, some miners won't agree that enabling better privacy is a good thing or their local governments won't support it. Either way, they can attack the Zerocoin merge-mined chain with a marginal cost of nearly zero. Luke-Jr believed that Namecoin was more secure than Litecoin because while Litecoin can only be attacked by external attackers and current miners of other scrypt coins, Namecoin can also be attacked by Bitcoin miners that aren't currently mining Namecoin. He suggested that new coins should be created with SHA256 and merged mining in mind or merged mine with Litecoin if they still believe scrypt is so "anti-ASIC" and "centralization-resistant". He argued that merged mining is not only about not competing for proof of work but also wasting resources: the more mining subsidies to different chains, the more wasted resources. Luke-Jr was against the idea of sacrificing something external and making bitcoins appear since it sounded crazy to him. He didn't see how this pegging contributed in anything to a technical argument against merged mining, but instead, it looked like a moral argument against altcoin in general. If one doesn't plan to merge mine, having SHA256 doesn't make sense because that makes them more fragile to potential bitcoin miners attacks and chainhopers. Finally, he challenged Todd to prove that merged mining is insecure, and he would prove him wrong.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T23:17:04.832204+00:00