Author: Eric Lombrozo 2015-07-13 17:33:31
Published on: 2015-07-13T17:33:31+00:00
The discussion on the Bitcoin-dev mailing list revolves around SPV mining and its impact on the network. Jorge Timón argues that all miners should validate transactions, especially in light of recent attacks. He suggests that SPV mining is not rational since it blindly spends energy hashing on top of something that may be worthless. Instead, he recommends that miners keep mining on top of the old block until they have fully validated the new one, even if it slightly increases the orphan rate.However, another participant points out that F2Pool/AntPool are finding out about new blocks by connecting to other pools via stratum anonymously and determining what block hash they are telling their hashers to work on. This means that fake information will lead to making invalid blocks, causing a direct loss of money. The only hope for these pools is to identify which connections correspond to other pools with high reliability and target just those connections.The discussion also touches on the use of SPV as protection against third-party-run trusted full nodes from lying to users. While relying purely on SPV with low numbers of confirmations is not very smart, it can give reasonable protection against fake blocks created by attackers targeting enough people at once. However, this is difficult to achieve given the small percentage of hashing power attackers likely have, and the timing that works in defenders' favor. Trusted third party-run full nodes, combined with SPV, can provide reasonable safety for now.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T02:22:12.910569+00:00