Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Fork of invalid blocks due to BIP66 violations

From: odinn <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 03 Jul 2015 20:32:47 -0700

"The Wall Street of Bitcoin"

On 07/03/2015 08:30 PM, Peter Todd wrote:
> On Sat, Jul 04, 2015 at 03:17:17AM +0000, Gregory Maxwell wrote:
>> On Sat, Jul 4, 2015 at 3:11 AM, Raystonn <[email-masked]>
>> wrote:
>>> We need some analysis on why this has happened.  It appears the
>>> larger hashrate is violating BIP66.  Thus it appears the
>>> network is rejecting this BIP, though potentially accidentally.
>>> If this is an accident, how is such a large portion of hashrate
>>> forking, and what can we do to avoid this in the future?
>> 
>> A near majority of the hashrate on the network appears to be SPV
>> mining.
> 
> As for what "SPV mining" is:
> 
> While blocks are propagating throughout the network, frequently
> it's possible for miners to get the header of the block before they
> get and fully validate the block itself. This is just a few seconds
> to tens of seconds, but that's a big deal for profitability. So
> miners have been running custom patches that mine on top of the
> longest chain they know about, even if they haven't actually
> verified the blocks in it due to propagation delays.
> 
> Unfortunately the Bitcoin protocol lets you do that, and the extra
> % of revenue makes a big difference when you take into account the
> low profit margins of mining these days. BIP66 happened to trigger
> this issue this time, but actually *any* miner creating an invalid
> block for *any* reason would have done so with the software miners
> are running right now.
> 
> 
> 
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