From: Eric Voskuil <eric@voskuil•org>
To: Adam Back <adam@cypherspace•org>,
Bitcoin Dev <bitcoin-dev@lists•linuxfoundation.org>
Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] summarising security assumptions (re cost metrics)
Date: Thu, 05 Nov 2015 15:33:26 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <563BE746.5030406@voskuil.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CALqxMTE1JDsT8fSoDZVTUWfnw4Cmb9LkDa+B-XUyXGPxAYernA@mail.gmail.com>
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On 11/05/2015 03:03 PM, Adam Back via bitcoin-dev wrote:
> ...
> Validators: Economically dependent full nodes are an important part of
> Bitcoin's security model because they assure Bitcoin security by
> enforcing consensus rules. While full nodes do not have orphan
> risk, we also dont want maliciously crafted blocks with pathological
> validation cost to erode security by knocking reasonable spec full
> nodes off the network on CPU (or bandwidth grounds).
> ...
> Validators vs Miner decentralisation balance:
>
> There is a tradeoff where we can tolerate weak miner decentralisation
> if we can rely on good validator decentralisation or vice versa. But
> both being weak is risky. Currently given mining centralisation
> itself is weak, that makes validator decentralisation a critical
> remaining defence - ie security depends more on validator
> decentralisation than it would if mining decentralisation was in a
> better shape.
This side of the security model seems underappreciated, if not poorly
understood. Weakening is not just occurring because of the proliferation
of non-validating wallet software and centralized (web) wallets, but
also centralized Bitcoin APIs.
Over time developers tend to settle on a couple of API providers for a
given problem. Bing and Google for search and mapping, for example. All
applications and users of them, depending on an API service, reduce to a
single validator. Imagine most Bitcoin applications built on the
equivalent of Bing and Google.
e
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next prev parent reply other threads:[~2015-11-05 23:33 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2015-11-05 23:03 Adam Back
2015-11-05 23:33 ` Eric Voskuil [this message]
2015-11-06 1:56 ` Jeremy
2015-11-06 8:05 ` Chris Priest
2015-11-06 14:08 ` Adam Back
2015-11-06 23:41 ` Chris Priest
2015-11-07 0:44 ` Eric Voskuil
2015-11-08 14:54 ` Gavin Andresen
2015-11-08 17:19 ` Bryan Bishop
2015-11-09 16:27 ` Gavin Andresen
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