Author: Raúl Martínez 2014-06-17 08:57:06
Published on: 2014-06-17T08:57:06+00:00
Recently, the news has been circulating about Ghash pool controlling 51% of the hashrate which some consider a threat while others think it's not harmful. To prevent this from happening again, the proposal is to start thinking about miners that join a pool like independent miners and not slave miners. This can be achieved by creating a new mining protocol that does not rely on the pool sending the list of transactions to include in a block. The protocol would require each individual miner to collect transactions on their own and mine that, either by running a full node or by running an SPV-like node that asks other nodes for transactions. Once this protocol is developed and standardized, the community could require all pools to use it by recommending it. Pool owners could send some instructions using this protocol to the miner about how many transactions to include per block, how many zero-fee transactions to include, how much the minimum fee per Kb to include transactions is, and some information about the Coinbase field in the block. This way, it is impossible to perform some of the possible 51% attacks. A pool owner can't mine a new chain (selfish mining), perform double spends or reverse transactions, decide which transactions not to include, or get all the rewards by avoiding other pools from mining blocks because the pool client knows the last block independently that is from his pool or other. The only thing that a 51% pool owner can do is to shut down his pool and drop the hashrate by 51% because he does not control the miners. However, if the pool owner owns all the hardware in the pool or the pool clients don't use this protocol, the proposal is not valid. It is still unclear whether such a protocol exists or has been developed, and there might be other ways to address this threat.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T00:15:04.988198+00:00