Author: Christophe Biocca 2014-06-17 14:20:42
Published on: 2014-06-17T14:20:42+00:00
The GHash.io pool controlling 51% of the hashrate is a concern for some in the Bitcoin community. An individual proposed a solution to stop this from happening again by creating 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 by their own and mine them. This could be achieved by running a full node or by running a Simplified Payment Verification (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, not by imposing it but by recommending it. Pool owners could send instructions using this protocol to miners about how many transactions to include per block, how many zero-fee transactions to include, how much is the minimum fee per kilobyte to include transactions and some information about the Coinbase field in the block.This way, it would be 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, or decide which transactions not to include. The only thing that a 51% pool owner can do is to shut down their pool and drop the hashrate by 51% because they do not control the miners.The proposal is valid if the pool owner does not own all the hardware in the pool, and if the pool clients use this protocol. However, most miners don't care and don't want to do the work to set it up. If someone figures out a way to make getblocktemplate (GBT) widely used (>50% hashpower), it would be a significant accomplishment.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T00:16:49.020624+00:00