Author: Gavin Andresen 2015-09-23 21:37:25
Published on: 2015-09-23T21:37:25+00:00
The conversation is about a potential protocol for Bitcoin mining that would allow miners to avoid validation work by utilizing weak blocks announced by someone else. However, the concern is that bigger miners may have more access to these weak blocks, making mining not progress-free. The proposed solution involves using forward-error-coded protocols (IBLTs) and merged mined block DAGs with blocks of arbitrary strength that are differentially coded against prior state to efficiently transmit new solutions regardless of who creates it and how different it is. There doesn't seem to be any incentive problems with this approach, and even if more miners decide to skip validation and mine variations of the highest-fee-paying weak block they've seen, invalid blocks will still get rejected by all the non-miners running full nodes. Finally, it's suggested that a big hashrate miner can dedicate some of their hashrate to announcing invalid weak blocks to get competitors to mine them and win.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T22:54:14.187739+00:00