Author: Peter Todd 2015-07-13 16:04:53
Published on: 2015-07-13T16:04:53+00:00
In an email conversation, Jorge Timón suggests that all miners should validate transactions to prevent the possibility of SPV (Simplified Payment Verification) mining. He believes full miners can benefit by leveraging their validation against SPV miners who blindly spend energy hashing on top of potentially worthless blocks. Timón recommends that miners keep mining on top of the old block until they have fully validated the new block, even if this slightly increases the orphan rate. The conversation also highlights the critical issue of F2Pool/AntPool finding out about new blocks. They connect to other pools anonymously via stratum and determine what block hash they are telling the hashers at the pool to work on. If other pools try to fake this information, they risk losing money immediately as they tell their own hashers to make invalid blocks. This has a high chance of being detected and can easily be spread into a "STOP MINING AT FOO POOL!" frenzy. The only hope for these pools is to identify which connections correspond to other pools with high reliability. Regarding SPV mining, Peter Todd argues that relying purely on SPV w/ low #'s of confirmations is not smart. Instead, SPV can give reasonable protection against third-party-run trusted full nodes from lying to you, simply because doing so has well-defined costs in terms of energy to create fake blocks. Targeting enough people at once to make a fake block a worthwhile investment is difficult, particularly when you take into account how timing works in the defenders favor. Between that and a trusted third party-run full node, you're probably reasonably safe, for now.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T02:21:36.954150+00:00