From: Jameson Lopp <jameson.lopp@gmail•com>
To: bitcoin-development@lists•sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP proposal - patch to raise selfish mining threshold.
Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:33:14 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <527947FA.8070508@gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAJHLa0PYKACnh27TRC4Yp6uSA0iKEAp+pYt6K_xWJfn2CxzGAw@mail.gmail.com>
The conversations that spawned from this paper have been fascinating to
read, but I have a problem with the conclusions. To quote the paper:
"The Bitcoin ecosystem is open to manipulation, and potential takeover,
by miners seeking to maximize their rewards. This paper presented
Selfish-Mine, a mining strategy that enables pools of colluding miners
that adopt it to earn revenues in excess of their mining power. Higher
revenues can lead new rational miners to join sel\fsh miner pools,
leading to a collapse of the decentralized currency."
Please explain to me why any rational miner would collude to earn
slightly higher short term profits at the expense of then wiping out the
value of all their bitcoins in the long term.
Also, if you felt that this vulnerability is an immediate danger to the
Bitcoin network, why publish the vulnerability publicly rather than
first disclosing it privately to the core developers? Apologies if you
did disclose it privately in the past; I've seen no mention of it.
--
Jameson Lopp
Software Engineer
Bronto Software
On 11/05/2013 01:58 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Alessandro Parisi <startithub@gmail•com> wrote:
>> this means that anytime a bug is found in Bitcoin protocol, chances are that
>> it would take a lot more time to get fixed
>
> Correct. There is significant potential that a fix can create other
> problems... and any major mistake could instantly destroy > $2
> billion worth of value.
>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2013-11-05 19:33 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2013-11-05 16:56 Ittay
2013-11-05 17:05 ` Peter Todd
2013-11-05 17:14 ` Peter Todd
2013-11-05 17:43 ` Ittay
2013-11-05 17:54 ` Mike Hearn
2013-11-05 18:07 ` Alessandro Parisi
2013-11-05 18:37 ` Jeff Garzik
2013-11-05 18:55 ` Alessandro Parisi
2013-11-05 18:58 ` Jeff Garzik
2013-11-05 19:33 ` Jameson Lopp [this message]
2013-11-05 19:56 ` Peter Todd
2013-11-05 17:26 ` Ittay
2013-11-05 17:37 ` Patrick
2013-11-05 18:18 ` Alessandro Parisi
2013-11-05 18:57 ` Jeremy Spilman
2013-11-05 22:49 ` Ittay
2013-11-07 20:05 ` [Bitcoin-development] comments on selfish-mining model (Re: BIP proposal - patch to raise selfish mining threshold.) Adam Back
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=527947FA.8070508@gmail.com \
--to=jameson.lopp@gmail$(echo .)com \
--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