{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","author_name":"npub15n7zls4lcps7wksmdctal39neyact74jljgsq86ylkzfn4njk95sv8vrz4","author_url":"https://nostr.ae/npub15n7zls4lcps7wksmdctal39neyact74jljgsq86ylkzfn4njk95sv8vrz4","provider_name":"njump","provider_url":"https://nostr.ae","html":"📅 Original date posted:2015-12-19\n📝 Original message:Peter Todd via bitcoin-dev [bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org] wrote:\n\u003e One of the issues raised by the pools present was block withholding\n\u003e attacks, which they said are a real issue for them. In particular, pools\n\u003e are receiving legitimate threats by bad actors threatening to use block\n\u003e withholding attacks against them.\n\nThe only possible other bad actors are other miners.  So who are the \"bad actor\"\nminers?  It's a short list of candidates.\n\n\u003e P2Pool is often brought up as a replacement for pools, but it itself is still\n\u003e relatively vulnerable to block withholding, and in any case has many other\n\u003e vulnerabilities and technical issues that has prevented widespread adoption of\n\u003e P2Pool.\n\nI've been trying to understand this source of \"vulnerabilities and technical\nissues\" with p2pool and have received a lot of contradictory information.  Can\nsomeone in the know summarize what the problems with p2pool are?\n\nThe economic situation where miners can be deprived of profit due to the lack of\nsynchronicity in block updates is a physics problem due to the size of the Earth\nand will never be removed.  This is a design flaw in Bitcoin.  Therefore a\ndifferent, more comprehensive solution is called for.\n\nMy solution to this is somewhat longer term and needs more simulation but\nfundamentally removes the source of contention and fixes the design flaw, while\nremaining as close \"in spirit\" to bitcoin as possible:\n    https://scalingbitcoin.org/hongkong2015/presentations/DAY2/2_breaking_the_chain_1_mcelrath.pdf\nNot only does block withholding simply not work to deny other miners income due\nto the absence of orphans, but I explicitly added a dis-incentive against\nwithholding blocks in terms of the \"cohort difficulty\".  Other graph-theoretic\nquantities are in general possible in the reward function to better align the\nincentives of miners with the correct operation of the system.  Also by lowering\nthe target difficulty and increasing the block (bead) rate, one lowers the\nvariance of miner income.\n\nPart of the reason I ask is that there has been some interest in testing my\nideas in p2pool itself (or a new similar share pool), but I'm failing to\nunderstand the source of all the complaints about p2pool.\n\n--\nCheers, Bob McElrath\n\n\"For every complex problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.\"\n    -- H. L. Mencken"}