Author: Rusty Russell 2015-09-24 01:11:03
Published on: 2015-09-24T01:11:03+00:00
Gavin Andresen, in a post on bitcoin-dev, has stated that he does not see any incentive problems regarding weak blocks in the Bitcoin mining process. While acknowledging that there is a potential problem with miners choosing to skip validation and mine a variation of a weak block, Andresen believes that invalid blocks will still be rejected by non-miners running full nodes. However, this would not be helpful for Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) nodes. Andresen goes on to suggest that if such behaviour were to occur, it would be a good strategy for big hash-rate miners to dedicate some of their hash rate to announcing invalid weak blocks in order to get competitors to mine them so they can collect fees. He notes that non-validating mining already occurs but with empty blocks. Finally, Andresen concludes that UTXO commitment will eventually be needed so that full nodes can inform SPV nodes about bad blocks.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T22:53:36.663637+00:00