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From: Dave Hudson <dave@hashingit.com>
To: insecurity@national.shitposting.agency
Cc: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Reducing the block rate instead of increasing the maximum block size
Date: Mon, 11 May 2015 12:49:03 +0100	[thread overview]
Message-ID: <DF13D23D-1F04-4970-A80A-4892374E5247@hashingit.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <66648462658adebb5e5be7fcba65e670@national.shitposting.agency>


> On 11 May 2015, at 12:10, insecurity@national.shitposting.agency 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.


  reply	other threads:[~2015-05-11 11:49 UTC|newest]

Thread overview: 10+ messages / expand[flat|nested]  mbox.gz  Atom feed  top
2015-05-11  7:03 [Bitcoin-development] Reducing the block rate instead of increasing the maximum block size Sergio Lerner
2015-05-11 10:34 ` Peter Todd
2015-05-11 11:10   ` insecurity
2015-05-11 11:49     ` Dave Hudson [this message]
2015-05-11 12:34       ` Christian Decker
2015-05-11 16:47 ` Luke Dashjr
     [not found] ` <5551021E.8010706@LeoWandersleb.de>
2015-05-12 18:55   ` Sergio Lerner
2015-05-11  7:30 Thy Shizzle
2015-05-11  8:16 ` Dave Hudson
2015-05-11  8:50 insecurity

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