Author: Sergio Lerner 2014-05-05 19:45:07
Published on: 2014-05-05T19:45:07+00:00
In an email thread dated 2nd May 2014, Sergio Lerner proposed a new mining protocol that would include 'uncle' blocks in the reward system. Joseph Bonneau raised two concerns regarding this idea. Firstly, he questioned whether the parent block would receive one unit of the reward while the uncle block would receive 0.5 units or if both would receive 0.5 units. Sergio confirmed that the latter was the correct interpretation. Secondly, Bonneau suggested that including uncle blocks could encourage kickback-style attacks where miners ignore uncles to avoid sharing the reward, which would favour large mining pools. However, Sergio refuted this suggestion by stating that including an uncle block can be done at any time before a coinbase matures (100 blocks). Therefore, it is difficult for a miner to prevent other miners from including the uncle and taking the reward given by uncle inclusion. Furthermore, he argued that a big miner trying to bribe all other miners not to include the uncle would be too costly. Joseph Bonneau also expressed concern about the method used to break ties between blocks A and B in the DECOR protocol. He suggested that hashing the blocks to decide the "winner" would allow miners to predict their block's likelihood of winning a collision by looking at how high or low its hash is, leading to selfish mining. Instead, he proposed seeing if H(A||B) could be used to determine in advance if a block is likely to win a collision. However, Sergio believed that selfish miners cannot get any advantage in the DECOR protocol since the blocks that lose the latency race will come back as uncles and get their reward share anyway.
Updated on: 2023-06-08T22:10:34.238481+00:00