Author: David A. Harding 2019-10-04 08:20:31
Published on: 2019-10-04T08:20:31+00:00
Braydon Fuller via bitcoin-dev has proposed a solution to DoS attacks that does not require enabling or maintaining checkpoints and provides improved security. An alternative solution proposed by Gregory Maxwell was a soft fork to raise the minimum difficulty. This solution can be found in various old IRC conversations as well as in related changes to Bitcoin Core such as PR #9053 adding minimum chain work and the assumed-valid change added in Bitcoin Core 0.14.0.The solutions proposed in section 4.2 and 4.3 of Braydon's paper have the advantage of not requiring any consensus changes. However, Dave expresses concern regarding the throttling and pruning solutions, stating that he finds it hard to analyze the full consequences of these solutions. He worries that the mechanisms could also be used to keep a node that synced to a long-but-lower-PoW chain on that false chain (or other false chain) indefinitely even if it had connections to honest peers that tried to tell it about the most-PoW chain.Dave further explains that the effect of raising the minimum difficulty can be easily analyzed. It is a change to the consensus rules, so it should be approached with caution, but it's the kind of basically-one-line change that he expects should be easy for a large number of people to review directly. Assuming the choice of a new minimum (and what point in the chain to use it) is sane, Dave thinks it would be easy to get acceptance, and he thinks it would further be easy increase it again every five years or so as overall hash rate increases.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T21:47:11.918627+00:00