Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Block Size Increase Requirements

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 8 May 2015 23:08:33 -0400

On Fri, May 08, 2015 at 08:47:52PM +0100, Tier Nolan wrote:
> On Fri, May 8, 2015 at 5:37 PM, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:
> 
> > The soft-limit is there miners themselves produce smaller blocks; the
> > soft-limit does not prevent other miners from producing larger blocks.
> >
> 
> I wonder if having a "miner" flag would be good for the network.

Makes it trivial to find miners and DoS attack them - a huge risk to the
network as a whole, as well as the miners.

Right now pools already get DoSed all the time through their work
submission systems; getting DoS attacked via their nodes as well would
be a disaster.

> When in "miner mode", the client would reject 4MB blocks and wouldn't build
> on them.  The reference client might even track the miner and the non-miner
> chain tip.
> 
> Miners would refuse to build on 5MB blocks, but merchants and general users
> would accept them.

That'd be an excellent way to double-spend merchants, significantly
increasing the chance that the double-spend would succeed as you only
have to get sufficient hashing power to get the lucky blocks; you don't
need enough hashing power to *also* ensure those blocks don't become the
longest chain, removing the need to sybil attack your target.

-- 
'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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