From: Patrick <patrick@intersango•com>
To: bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP proposal - patch to raise selfish mining threshold.
Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 09:37:54 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <52792CF2.10709@intersango.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CABT1wWnPJOKKT5v2hGePkUT8jNau=TEK5s-n2so2kQKnv-HfqQ@mail.gmail.com>
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The ratio of honest miners that mine the first block they see is > 0.5
Your proposed solution would reduce that ratio to 0.5
In other words your proposed change would make the attack you describe
easier not harder.
On 11/05/2013 09:26 AM, Ittay wrote:
> That sounds like selfish mining, and the magic number is 25%. That's
> the minimal pool size.
> Today the threshold is 0% with good connectivity.
>
> If I misunderstood your point, please elaborate.
>
> Ittay
>
>
>
> On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Peter Todd <pete@petertodd•org
> <mailto:pete@petertodd•org>> wrote:
>
> 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 <http://petertodd.org>
> 0000000000000005e25ca9b9fe62bdd6e8a2b4527ad61753dd2113c268bec707
>
>
>
>
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2013-11-05 18:01 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
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 [this message]
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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