From: Peter Todd <pete@petertodd•org>
To: Ittay <ittay.eyal@cornell•edu>
Cc: "Bitcoin Dev" <bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net>,
"Gavin Andresen" <gavin@bitcoinfoundation•org>,
"Emin Gün Sirer" <egs@systems•cs.cornell.edu>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP proposal - patch to raise selfish mining threshold.
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2013 12:05:41 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20131105170541.GA13660@petertodd.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CABT1wWkOukEzxK5fLbnA4ZgJGN1hb_DMteCJOfA13FE_QZCi=Q@mail.gmail.com>
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On Tue, Nov 05, 2013 at 11:56:53AM -0500, Ittay wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Please see below our BIP for raising the selfish mining threshold.
> Looking forward to your comments.
<snip>
> 2. No new vulnerabilities introduced:
> Currently the choice among equal-length chains is done arbitrarily,
> depending on network topology. This arbitrariness is a source of
> vulnerability. We replace it with explicit randomness, which is at the
> control of the protocol. The change does not introduce executions that were
> not possible with the old protocol.
Credit goes to Gregory Maxwell for pointing this out, but the random
choice solution does in fact introduce a vulnerability in that it
creates incentives for pools over a certain size to withhold blocks
rather than immediately broadcasting all blocks found.
The problem is that when the pool eventually choses to reveal the block
they mined, 50% of the hashing power switches, thus splitting the
network. Like the original attack this can be to their benefit. For
pools over a certain size this strategy is profitable even without
investing in a low-latency network; Maxwell or someone else can chime in
with the details for deriving that threshold.
I won't get a chance to for a few hours, but someone should do the
analysis on a deterministic switching scheme.
--
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2013-11-05 17:07 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2013-11-05 16:56 Ittay
2013-11-05 17:05 ` Peter Todd [this message]
2013-11-05 17:14 ` Peter Todd
2013-11-05 17:43 ` Ittay
2013-11-05 17:54 ` Mike Hearn
2013-11-05 18:07 ` Alessandro Parisi
2013-11-05 18:37 ` Jeff Garzik
2013-11-05 18:55 ` Alessandro Parisi
2013-11-05 18:58 ` Jeff Garzik
2013-11-05 19:33 ` Jameson Lopp
2013-11-05 19:56 ` Peter Todd
2013-11-05 17:26 ` Ittay
2013-11-05 17:37 ` Patrick
2013-11-05 18:18 ` Alessandro Parisi
2013-11-05 18:57 ` Jeremy Spilman
2013-11-05 22:49 ` Ittay
2013-11-07 20:05 ` [Bitcoin-development] comments on selfish-mining model (Re: BIP proposal - patch to raise selfish mining threshold.) Adam Back
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