Author: Nick ODell 2017-03-24 17:29:54
Published on: 2017-03-24T17:29:54+00:00
The email discusses concerns related to the centralization of mining power in the Bitcoin network. The author suggests that a small group of individuals control a large and growing amount of hash power, which could lead to a dangerous agenda to hijack the Bitcoin network. The malicious miners threaten to attack the valid chain by dedicating some mining power solely to attacking it with empty blocks and orphaning the valid chain. One proposal for a potential solution is to update nodes to ignore empty blocks so that they cannot be used to DOS attack the blockchain, but there may be potential risks and attacks resulting from both having such new rulesets and not doing anything. Additionally, the author proposes that nodes not only ignore empty blocks but also blocks that are abnormally small compared to the number of valid transactions in mempool. The email concludes with a call for discussion on various attacks and how they can be guarded against, along with various other contingency plans.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:29:10.908922+00:00