> Date: Mon, 17 Aug 2015 05:15:15 -0400
> From: jl2012@xbt.hk
> To: luvb@hotmail.com
> CC: bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org
> Subject: Re: [bitcoin-dev] Miners are struggling with blocks far smaller than 750KB blocks and resorting to SPV mining
>
> The traffic between the pool server and individual hashers is far busier
> than 50kB/30s. If their bandwidth is so limited, hashers would have
> switched to other pools already.
>
> All these data may prove is they have very bad mining codes. For
> example, their hashers may not be required to update the transaction
> list regularly. I don't think they are struggling. They are just too
> lazy or think that's too risky to improve their code. After all, they
> are generating half million USD per day and a few seconds of downtime
> would hurt.
>
> By the way, vast majority of the full blocks (>0.99MB) on the blockchain
> are generated by Chinese pools.
>
> Luv Khemani via bitcoin-dev ì¶ 2015-08-17 04:42 Œ‘µ½:
> > Hi all,
> >
> > I previously mentioned in a post that i believe that technically
> > nodes are capable of handling blocks an order of magnitude larger than
> > the current blocksize limit, the only missing thing was an incentive
> > to run them. I have been monitoring the blockchain for the past couple
> > of weeks and am seeing that even miners who have all the incentives
> > are for whatever reason struggling to download and validate much
> > smaller blocks.
> >
> > The data actually paints a very grim picture of the current
> > bandwidth/validating capacity of the global mining network.
> >
> > See the following empty blocks mined despite a non-trivial elapsed
> > time from the previous block just from the past couple of days alone
> > (Data from insight.bitpay.com):
> >
> > EmptyBlock /Time since previous block/ Size of previous
> > block(bytes)/Mined by
> > ====================================================370165 29s 720784
> > Antpool
> > 370160 31s 50129 BTCChinaPool
> > 370076 49s 469988 F2Pool
> > 370059 34s 110994 Antpool
> > 370057 73s 131603 Antpool
> >
> > We have preceding blocks as small as 50KB with 30s passing and the
> > miner continues to mine empty blocks via SPV mining.
> > The most glaring case is Block 370057 where despite 73s elapsing and
> > the preceding block being a mere 131KB, the miner is unable to
> > download/validate fast enough to include transactions in his block.
> > Unless ofcourse the miner is mining empty blocks on purpose, which
> > does not make sense as all of these pools do mine blocks with
> > transactions when the elapsed time is greater.
> >
> > This is a cause for great concern, because if miners are SPV mining
> > for a whole minute for <750KB blocks, at 8MB blocks, the network will
> > just fall apart as a significant portion of the hashing power SPV
> > mines throughout. All a single malicious miner has to do is mine an
> > invalid block on purpose, let these pools SPV mine on top of them
> > while it mines a valid block free of their competition. Yes, these
> > pools deserve to lose money in that event, but the impact of reorgs
> > and many block orphans for anyone not running a full node could be
> > disastrous, especially more so in the XT world where Mike wants
> > everyone to be running SPV nodes. I simply don't see the XT fork
> > having any chance of surviving if SPV nodes are unreliable.
> >
> > And if these pools go out of business, it will lead to even more
> > mining centralization which is already too centralized today.
> >
> > Can anyone representing these pools comment on why this is happening?
> > Are these pools on Matt's relay network?
> >
> >
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