Author: Emin Gün Sirer 2017-03-24 16:27:47
Published on: 2017-03-24T16:27:47+00:00
The problem of centralization of mining power in Bitcoin has become a growing concern, with a small group of miners controlling a large and increasing amount of hash power. This creates the potential for a dangerous agenda to hijack the Bitcoin network and centralize the power of consensus within the mining community. The attackers are threatening to attack the valid chain by dedicating some mining power solely to mining empty blocks and orphaning the valid chain, and if they succeed, it could force economic activity onto their adversary-controlled chain. Defending against attacks on the valid chain is crucial to preventing it from dying. One proposed solution is to update nodes to ignore empty blocks, so that mined empty blocks cannot be used to DOS attack the blockchain. Additionally, nodes could be updated to ignore blocks that are abnormally small compared to the number of valid transactions in mempool. However, it is important to consider the potential risks and attacks resulting from both having such new rulesets and not doing anything. If a malicious miner with half or majority control passes invalid blocks, the worst-case scenario is a hardfork coin split in which the non-compliant chain becomes an altcoin. However, the attackers are threatening to kill the valid chain to force economic activity to their adversary-controlled chain. In response, the technical defense against an attacking majority of miners is to change the PoW, effectively moving the community off into a new altcoin where the attackers don't have majority hash power. 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.
Updated on: 2023-06-11T22:30:31.635428+00:00