Author: Ron Elliott 2014-06-17 13:58:53
Published on: 2014-06-17T13:58:53+00:00
In June 2014, Raúl Martínez proposed a new mining protocol that could stop a pool from controlling more than 51% of the hashrate. He suggested that miners should join a pool like independent miners rather than slave miners, which would require developing a new mining protocol that does not rely on the pool sending the list of transactions to include in a block. Each individual miner would have to collect transactions themselves and mine them. This could be achieved by running a full node or by running an SPV node that asks other nodes for transactions. Once this protocol is developed and standardized, it could be recommended to all pools to use it. Pool owners could send some instructions using this protocol to the miner about how many transactions to include per block, how many 0 fee transactions to include, how much is the minimum fee per Kb to include transactions, and some info about the Coinbase field in the block.By using this protocol, some of the possible 51% attacks can be avoided. A pool owner cannot 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. 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, the proposal may not be valid, and if the pool clients do not use this protocol, it may not be valid as well.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T00:15:31.356510+00:00