Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Reducing the block rate instead of increasing the maximum block size

From: Dave Hudson <[email-masked]>
Date: Mon, 11 May 2015 12:49:03 +0100

> On 11 May 2015, at 12:10, [email-masked] wrote:
> 
> On 2015-05-11 10:34, Peter Todd wrote:
>> How do you see that blacklisting actually being done?
> 
> Same way ghash.io was banned from the network when used Finney attacks
> against BetCoin Dice.
> 
> As Andreas Antonopoulos says, if any of the miners do anything bad, we
> just ban them from mining. Any sort of attack like this only lasts 10
> minutes as a result. Stop worrying so much.

This doesn't work because a large-scale miner can trivially make themselves look like a very large number of much smaller scale miners. Their ability to minimize variance comes from the cumulative totals they control so 10 pools of 1% of the network cumulatively have the same variance as 1 pool with 10% of the network. It's also very easy for miners to relay blocks via different addresses and the cost is minimal. The biggest cost would be in DDoS prevention and a miner that actually split their pool into lots of small fragments would actually give themselves the ability to do quite a lot of DDoS mitigation anyway. If no-one is doing this right now it's simply because they've not had the right incentives to make it worthwhile; if the incentives make it worthwhile then this is pretty trivial to do.

This is one area where anonymity on behalf of transaction validators and block makers essentially makes it pretty-much impossible to maintain any sort of sanctions against antisocial behaviour.