Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Auto-generated miner backbone

From: Michael Gronager <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 04 Nov 2013 12:58:06 +0100

On 4/11/13, 12:26 , Mike Hearn wrote:
> W.R.T. this paper and the oft-discussed miner backbone,
> 
>   http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243v1.pdf
> 
> I'm wondering about an alternative protocol change that perhaps has less
> subtle implications than their suggested change. 

The suggested change is actually very simple (minutes of coding) and
elegant and addresses precisely the identified problem. It is actually a
mental shortcut in the assumption of how probability works when mining a
chain. The paper simply corrects this error - nice work!

> Rather than address the
> problem by assuming the network is full of sybil nodes and changing the
> rules for selecting the chain to build on, how about if we wrote code to
> automatically build a miner backbone by having IP addresses of nodes
> embedded into coinbases, then having any bitcoind that is creating work
> automatically connect to IPs that appeared in enough recent blocks? 

You suggestion could perhaps be fun for other purposes, but does not
rule out pools of "selfish miners". Further, it binds physical state
(ip) to the blockchain, which has so far held no assumptions on the
technology of the system on which it is running.

> 
> This would have the effect of automatically linking all the major pools
> together, with no administration overhead.
> 
> For bonus points, the IPs could be IPv6 and then the trick we use to
> pack hidden services into IPv6 address space would allow nodes to be
> reached via Tor. This might be useful in the case of pools that don't to
> reveal the location of their bitcoin node[s], like for anti-DoS reasons.
> 
> It feels like this should be achievable with a few days of solid coding
> and a couple of new command line flags, and the impact is much easier to
> reason about than a fundamental rule change like the one proposed by the
> paper.
> 
> 
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