Author: Michael Gronager 2013-11-04 12:40:00
Published on: 2013-11-04T12:40:00+00:00
The Bitcoin protocol has a problem with selfish miners having an advantage, but a proposal has been made for a simple, backwards-compatible change to the protocol to address this issue and raise the threshold. The proposal suggests that when a miner learns of competing branches of the same length, it should propagate all of them and choose which one to mine on uniformly at random. This would remove the advantage of selfish miners who know which chain the other will work on and choose the other, making it likely that the other will waste their effort. However, this random scheme would only be used in the case of two competing chains, which happens on average every 60 blocks. Using this scheme might result in roughly losing 1/(2*60) ~ 1% of your blocks, but it makes it harder for such an attack to happen. It could also be considered a Sybil attack, but it is better to minimize the risk than introduce various social network solutions that have central authorization or oracle assumptions. A member disagrees with the proposal, stating that anyone could broadcast a newly discovered block at any point and have a 50% chance of being the winner, which would fundamentally change the dynamics of how Bitcoin works and require careful thought and study. The proposed solution does not address the problem they bring up, but instead changes the size of the threshold required. Ultimately, the attack is a Sybil attack, and the solution should be one that addresses this type of attack.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T19:09:08.572135+00:00