Re: [bitcoin-dev] Miner dilution attack on Bitcoin - is that something plausible?

[Bryan Bishop <kanzure@gmail.com>]

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On Mon, Jun 18, 2018 at 3:40 PM, Bram Cohen via bitcoin-dev <
bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote:

> Not sure what you're saying here. The block rate can't be particularly
> increased or decreased in the long run due to the work difficulty
> adjustment getting you roughly back where you started no matter what.
> Someone could DOS the system by producing empty blocks, sure, that's a
> central attack of what can happen when someone does a 51% attack with no
> special countermeasures other than everything that Bitcoin does at its
> core. An attacker or group of attackers could conspire to reduce block
> sizes in order to increase transaction fees, in fact they could do that
> with a miner activated soft fork. That appears both doable and given past
> things which have happened with transaction fees in the past potentially
> lucrative, particularly as block rewards fall in the future. Please don't
> tell the big mining pools about it.
>

Bram, actually I thought the previous discussions determined that less than
51% hashrate would be required for certain soft-hard-forks employing empty
blocks?

I don't have a specific reference:
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-February/012377.html
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-February/012457.html
https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/2016-December/013332.html

- Bryan
http://heybryan.org/
1 512 203 0507

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