Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Dynamically Controlled Bitcoin Block Size Max Cap

From: Peter Todd <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 21 Aug 2015 17:01:27 -0700

On Fri, Aug 21, 2015 at 04:16:39PM -0700, Tom Harding wrote:
> On 8/21/2015 3:21 PM, Peter Todd wrote:
> > To use a car analogy, Pieter Wuille has shown that the brake cylinders
> > have a fatigue problem, and if used in stop-and-go traffic regularly
> > they'll fail during heavy braking, potentially killing someone. You've
> > countered with a study of highway driving, showing that if the car is
> > only used on the highway the brakes have no issues, claiming that the
> > car design is perfectly safe. 
> 
> No.  If we must play the analogy game, it was found that the car crashes
> when the brakes are bad (minority hash power partitioned) the radio is
> on (partitioned miners had small individual hashrate).
> 
> I checked the scenario where only the radio is on, and found the car
> does not crash.

Incidentally, what's your acceptable revenue difference between a small
(1% hashing power) and large (%30 hashing power) miner, all else being
equal? (remember that we shouldn't preclude variance reduction
techniques such as p2pool and pooled-solo mode)

Equally, what kind of attacks on miners do you think we need to be able to
resist? E.g. DoS attacks, hacking, etc.

That would let me know if you're definition of "the brakes are bad"
corresponds to normal usage, or something that's not reasonable to
design for.

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