Author: Kalle Rosenbaum 2015-09-28 08:30:42
Published on: 2015-09-28T08:30:42+00:00
In a bitcoin-dev discussion, Kalle Rosenbaum asks why a miner would publish a weak block if they find one. Gregory Maxwell responds that the cost to the miner is effectively nothing due to efficient differential transmission and not sending theirs does little to nothing to deny others the improvement. In an alternative weak-blockless implementation, every miner sends to every other miner what they're working on every N seconds with no harm done if a miner doesn't transmit theirs. Weak blocks are added to this scheme using hashcash as a rate limiting mechanism - a coordination free lottery weighed by hash-power decides who can transmit. If a miner doesn't participate in the lottery and shares their solutions, there is no major harm for other users, but to the extent that their work was different from anyone else, they'll suffer because they failed to make use of their chance to influence what could be efficiently transmitted to include their own blocks. The discussion further explores the logic behind transitive relaying of announcements and the importance of relaying blocks to help the network.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T22:54:47.897149+00:00