Author: Michael Gronager 2013-11-04 11:58:06
Published on: 2013-11-04T11:58:06+00:00
In an email exchange on the Bitcoin-development mailing list, Mike Hearn suggests an alternative protocol change in response to a recently-discussed miner backbone paper. While he approves of the proposed change as "simple and elegant," he floats the idea of using IP addresses embedded in coinbases to build a miner backbone, allowing bitcoind to automatically connect to IPs that appeared in enough recent blocks. He notes that this method would link major pools together with no administration overhead and could use IPv6 to allow nodes to be reached via Tor. However, Hearn admits that his suggestion may not rule out selfish miners and would bind physical state (IP) to the blockchain, which has held no assumptions about the technology of the system on which it is running. Nonetheless, he believes that his suggestion could be achieved with a few days of solid coding and a couple of new command line flags, without the complicated implications of a fundamental rule change. The email ends with an unrelated advertisement for a white paper on secure code signing practices for Android apps.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T19:09:48.583339+00:00