From: Peter Todd <pete@petertodd•org>
To: bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net
Subject: [Bitcoin-development] Cloud mining should be using merkle sum trees to prove they aren't doing fractional reserve mining
Date: Mon, 18 Aug 2014 22:30:25 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20140819023025.GA3074@petertodd.org> (raw)
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1152 bytes --]
A number of people - most recently Gavin Andresen - have speculated that
cloud hashing operations may in fact be ponzi schemes that don't
actually own the hashing power they claim to own. The claim is that the
customers upfront purchase of hashing power is simply kept and used to
pay off existing customer profits rather than actually being used to
purchase mining equipment.
We can use merkle sum trees to detect this fraud cryptographically:
1) Put the MH/s paid for by each account into a merkle sum tree, each
with a customer supplied unique identifier. (like their email address)
This allows the customer to verify that the hashing power they paid for
has been included in the total hashing power claimed.
2) Mark blocks found by the operation publicly so they can be associated
with the specific cloud mining operation; putting the merkle sum tree
root hash into the coinbase or an OP_RETURN output would be ideal. This
allows anyone to verify that the hashing power claimed corresponds to
the # of blocks actually found.
--
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
0000000000000000201d505432d708aa2edb656f6fe34d686b37d4747e5ff389
[-- Attachment #2: Digital signature --]
[-- Type: application/pgp-signature, Size: 490 bytes --]
reply other threads:[~2014-08-19 2:30 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: [no followups] expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=20140819023025.GA3074@petertodd.org \
--to=pete@petertodd$(echo .)org \
--cc=bitcoin-development@lists$(echo .)sourceforge.net \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox