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

Summary:

The current situation with bitcoin is that the number of full nodes is low and there is no incentive for people to run them. Due to this, a small group of miners control a large amount of hashing power which makes the network vulnerable to attacks. The conspiring miners have a plan to take over the network by dedicating some mining power solely to attacking the valid chain by mining empty blocks and orphaning the valid chain. This would make the valid chain unusable and force economic activity to the adversary controlled chain. Defending against abnormal blocks looks to be a non-issue and the btc devs perfectly know how to create a pattern based on history to detect abnormal blocks (including some strange transactions) and reject them, but this further depends on the ability of current full nodes to upgrade. It is difficult to quickly increase the number of full nodes and increasing the mining power by standard means looks too expensive, useless, and not profitable. It is suggested that the bitcoin miner Epic Scale, which Bittorrent Inc tried to include quietly in utorrent forgetting to ask the authorization of the selected users, should be resurrected. Utorrent users might upgrade (potentially 150 M), and the resulting mining power might be sufficient, depending on the incentive for this, which is TBD. Another potential solution is to activate proof of space. Bitcoin-qt is not efficient in this situation, but utorrent sw is quite good to be intrusive, run in the background when you think you have closed it, run things you don't know, etc. If the btc folks want to promote full nodes too, it would not be a bad idea to put 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 (incentive TBD too) assuming they know about upnp/port forwarding. The proposal for a potential solution is to update nodes to ignore empty blocks so that mined empty blocks cannot be used to DOS attack the blockchain. It is also suggested that nodes not only ignore empty blocks but also blocks that are abnormally small compared to the number of valid transactions in mempool. Time is running short, and there needs to be a discussion on various attacks and how they can be guarded against along with various other contingency plans.

Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:29:36.512951+00:00