Author: Eric Lombrozo 2015-07-13 17:49:40
Published on: 2015-07-13T17:49:40+00:00
In a message dated July 11, 2015, Jorge Timón stated that all miners should validate transactions as it is crucial in light of the latest attack. He further explains that full miners can gain an advantage over SPV miners by leveraging their full validation against them. According to him, SPV mining makes no sense, and some miners claim to do it for very short periods of time, which shouldn't be as bad as doing it all the time. He suggests that it would be more rational for them to keep mining on top of the old block until they've fully validated the new block. However, Peter Todd points out a critical element about what F2Pool/AntPool were (are?) doing. They're finding out about new blocks not by getting block headers from just anywhere but by connecting anonymously to other pools via stratum and determining what block hash they're telling the hashers at the pool to work on. This opens up a vulnerability to fake information being given and invalid blocks being made, which can easily be detected and result in loss of money. Eric Lombrozo stresses the importance of making secure validation cheaper to maintain the integrity of the security model and ensure scalability and decentralization. He believes that this should be the number one priority. Todd also adds that relying purely on SPV with low numbers of confirmations isn't smart, but it does give reasonable protection against third-party-run trusted full nodes from lying 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 defender's favor.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T02:20:56.118580+00:00