Author: Tier Nolan 2015-05-16 11:25:53
Published on: 2015-05-16T11:25:53+00:00
In an email exchange, Peter Todd proposed the idea of having a "miner" flag for the Bitcoin network. However, this proposal was met with concerns about the potential risks it posed. One such risk would be that it would make it easier to find miners and perform denial-of-service attacks on them. In order to mitigate against this risk, two chaintips could be tracked: the miner tip and the client tip. Miners would build on the miner tip while using the client tip for performing client services like wallets. The client would act as any other node, only giving out miner work based on the mining tip. However, if the two tips were to significantly fork, there would be a warning to the miner and perhaps even a refusal to give out new work. This would occur during a miner level hard-fork. Another concern raised was that having a miner flag would increase the chances of double-spending merchants. To launch such an attack, fake blocks would need to be produced, which is expensive and requires sufficient hashing power to get lucky blocks. Stephen Cale's suggestion of waiting more than one block before counting a transaction as confirmed would help mitigate this risk.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T19:54:19.597866+00:00