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From: Ittay <ittay.eyal@cornell.edu>
To: Jeremy Spilman <jeremy@taplink.co>
Cc: Ittay <ittay.eyal@cornell.edu>,
	"Gavin Andresen" <gavin@bitcoinfoundation.org>,
	"Emin Gün Sirer" <egs@systems.cs.cornell.edu>,
	"Bitcoin Dev" <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP proposal - patch to raise selfish mining threshold.
Date: Tue, 5 Nov 2013 17:49:26 -0500	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <CABT1wW=cKEA+TU5+n1n0cqvqwx8oWgpUXRmGJQCNLfQehxs6bQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <op.w53ax8dtyldrnw@laptop-air>

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On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Jeremy Spilman <jeremy@taplink.co> wrote:


> I think it's a stretch to say 'y' is 0 with good connectivity. Even the
> best connected mining pools today are concerned with this 'y' factor.
>

Check out the following paper for the effect a single node can have on
propagation, and on the relation between block size and propagation speed.
This strongly supports our assumption.
http://www.tik.ee.ethz.ch/file/49318d3f56c1d525aabf7fda78b23fc0/P2P2013_041.pdf


>
> Here's a probably very dumb idea... to throw out one possible "solution"...
>
> You want a way to fake-out the 'selfish miner' into disclosing their
> blocks -- how can your force their hand to prevent them from accumulating
> longer private chains?
>
> What if you propagate (and relay) an encrypted block header which honest
> miners will timestamp when they receive it, then 10 seconds later propagate
> the decryption key to unblind it. But here's the catch - maybe the
> decryption results in junk, maybe it results a new longer block. If it's a
> real block then it gets priority based on when the ciphertext was received
> instead of when the decryption key was received. Now 'selfish miner' can't
> race the network anymore, because they are always in state 0' and can't
> tell if they are up against a ghost, or a real competing block. If they
> wait for the decryption key to check, it's too late, and they are
> guaranteed to lose unless they can out-race the network, e.g. back at
> t=50%. Of course there would need to be some way to anti-DDoS this which
> allows for some amount of these fake-outs without letting them get out of
> hand.
>

That's a dangerous way to go, opening the door to DoS attacks, as you
mention. Besides, it makes a simple algorithm complicated, and doing such
changes may lead to different vulnerabilities that are difficult to cover.

Best,
Ittay

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  reply	other threads:[~2013-11-05 22:49 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 17+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2013-11-05 16:56 [Bitcoin-development] BIP proposal - patch to raise selfish mining threshold Ittay
2013-11-05 17:05 ` Peter Todd
2013-11-05 17:14   ` Peter Todd
2013-11-05 17:43     ` Ittay
2013-11-05 17:54       ` Mike Hearn
2013-11-05 18:07         ` Alessandro Parisi
2013-11-05 18:37           ` Jeff Garzik
2013-11-05 18:55             ` Alessandro Parisi
2013-11-05 18:58               ` Jeff Garzik
2013-11-05 19:33                 ` Jameson Lopp
2013-11-05 19:56       ` Peter Todd
2013-11-05 17:26   ` Ittay
2013-11-05 17:37     ` Patrick
2013-11-05 18:18       ` Alessandro Parisi
2013-11-05 18:57     ` Jeremy Spilman
2013-11-05 22:49       ` Ittay [this message]
2013-11-07 20:05 ` [Bitcoin-development] comments on selfish-mining model (Re: BIP proposal - patch to raise selfish mining threshold.) Adam Back

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