Defending against empty or near empty blocks from malicious miner takeover?

Summary:

The issue of centralized mining power in Bitcoin is a growing concern. Currently, only 16% of hashing power could be achieved even if every node invested $1000 into mining power. Due to the monopolization of ASICs, mining power is becoming very centralized and controlled by a small group of people who have expressed interest in hijacking the network for their own agenda. With the rise of such conspiring miners, it is feared that they will kill the valid chain to force economic activity onto their adversary-controlled chain. While empty or near-empty blocks can generally be protected by the incentive of miners to make money, the threat is there if the malicious miner with majority control is willing to lose out on these transaction fees and block reward if their intention is to suppress it to force the majority onto their chain. An update proposed is to ignore empty blocks as a means of mitigating the first problem of blocking empty or near-empty blocks. However, what about defense from blocks that are not empty but intentionally only have a few transactions in it? It may be possible to have nodes not only ignore empty blocks but also abnormally small blocks compared to the number of valid transactions in mempool. The time is running short, and there needs to be discussion on various attacks and how they can be guarded against along with various other contingency plans. It is suggested that Bitcoin should prioritize significantly increasing the number of full nodes, designing incentives for people to run full nodes and setting up a system for people to set up full nodes in an acceptable timeframe. Unfortunately, this was not a priority at all, maybe because of some historical consensus between miners and developers. If more full nodes were available, the situation would be much different. It is proposed that Bram Cohen be asked to resurrect the bitcoin miner Epic Scale which Bittorrent Inc tried to include quietly in utorrent forgetting to ask the authorization of the selected users, then utorrent users might upgrade, and the resulting mining power might be sufficient. Additionally, an alternative solution could be to activate by anticipation proof of space. It is further suggested that Bitcoin should promote full nodes too by putting the bitcoin-qt blockchain + chain state in a torrent making sure it is seeded correctly so people can download it and set up full nodes assuming they know about upnp/port forwarding.

Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:30:20.273503+00:00