Author: Peter Todd 2013-11-04 11:53:14
Published on: 2013-11-04T11:53:14+00:00
Mike Hearn suggests an alternative protocol change in response to a paper on miner backbone. He proposes building a miner backbone by embedding IP addresses of nodes into coinbases, allowing bitcoind to automatically connect to IPs from recent blocks, and linking all major pools together with no administration overhead. Hearn believes that this mechanism would allow wallets to get non-sybilled peers as well. For bonus points, the IPs could be IPv6, which allows nodes to be reached via Tor, useful for pools that don't want to reveal the location of their bitcoin node[s] due to anti-DoS reasons. Hearn argues that his proposal has an easier impact to reason about than a fundamental rule change like the one proposed by the paper. However, this encourages pools to only bother connecting to other pools, which is a strong centralizing force. The maximal benefit would be if two sets of addresses were published: public and private. On a technical level, the coinbase is limited in size, so Hearn defines a standard where this data is stored in an OP_RETURN txout. Multiple values with the same key should be allowed. This data should be placed in the last txout so that SPV nodes can eventually be given it with a SHA256 midstate.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T19:06:18.266479+00:00