Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Draft BIP : fixed-schedule block size increase

From: Ivan Brightly <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 26 Jun 2015 18:01:14 -0400

On Fri, Jun 26, 2015 at 3:08 PM, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:

> On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 05:24:23PM -0400, Gavin Andresen wrote:
> > On Tue, Jun 23, 2015 at 4:46 PM, Peter Todd <[email-masked]> wrote:
> >
> > > Pieter Wuille showed with simulations that miners with bad connectivity
> > > are negatively affected by other miners creating larger blocks.
> > >
> >
> > ... but the effect is only significant if they have an absurdly
> > low-bandwidth connection and do NOTHING to work around it (like rent a
> > server on the other side of the bandwidth bottleneck and write some code
> to
> > make sure you're creating blocks that will propagate quickly on both
> sides
> > of the bottleneck).
>
> "Just rent a server" forces miners into deploying insecure hosted
> infrastructure that's vulnerable to hacking and seizure; that we
> encourage this already is worrying; requiring it for miners to be
> profitable isn't acceptable.
>

There are a number of factors that contribute to mining vulnerabilities.
For example, presuming a miner is a meaningful contributor to the network,
they'll be using more electricity than their neighbors and will be easily
identifiable in the same way illegal grow-houses are identified by the
local power company working with authorities. A hacked or seized hosted
server is far easier to recover from than seized equipment. Its hard to see
how requiring a reasonably reliable internet connection is a particularly
high barrier to entry when compared to the other mining requirements, such
as funds to purchase ASICs, competitive electricity costs, reasonable
belief that equipment won't be stolen or seized, the technical knowledge
for setting up a p2pool node, etc.