Author: Marcos mayorga 2017-03-20 15:55:41
Published on: 2017-03-20T15:55:41+00:00
A member of the bitcoin-dev mailing list posted a suggestion that Bitcoin developers should not care about miners' business models, instead focusing on creating a better and more decentralized cryptocurrency. However, another member pointed out that this would significantly change the economic incentives behind bitcoin mining and could create an entirely new attack vector if 50-75% of SHA256 hardware is taken offline and purchased by an entity intending to do harm. Another member of the list expressed concern about the centralization of ASIC manufacturing in Bitcoin and suggested that preemptive action needs to be taken to protect the network from malicious actions by any party exerting influence over a substantial portion of SHA256 hardware. The proposal for Malicious miner Reactive Proof of Work Additions (MR POWA) suggests introducing multiple new proofs of work that are already established and proven within existing altcoin implementations, such as Scrypt, Ethash, and Equihash. This would mean four proofs of work with 40-minute block target difficulty for each, and two different proofs of work must find a block before a method can start hashing again. This adds protection from attacks by malicious SHA256 hashpower, which could even be required to wait until all other methods have found a block before being allowed to hash again. MR POWA would serve as a deterrent and ideally never activate, but it creates a huge risk to any malicious actor trying to abuse their position.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:15:10.252215+00:00