<oembed><type>rich</type><version>1.0</version><author_name>npub12tjaqer27049ejmvf0f3yd7kq6p93gg6ecavgrczge4rlzf59y5q2pye9h</author_name><author_url>https://nostr.ae/npub12tjaqer27049ejmvf0f3yd7kq6p93gg6ecavgrczge4rlzf59y5q2pye9h</author_url><provider_name>njump</provider_name><provider_url>https://nostr.ae</provider_url><html>📅 Original date posted:2016-12-18&#xA;📝 Original message:Hi All,&#xA;&#xA;I&#39;m coming late to the party. I like the Block75 proposal.&#xA;&#xA;Multiple people have said miners would/could stuff blocks with insincere&#xA;transactions to increase the block size, but it was never adequately&#xA;explained what they would gain from this. If there aren&#39;t enough legitimate&#xA;transactions to fill up the block, where do you plan to earn extra income&#xA;once the block is bigger?&#xA;&#xA;Miners would be incentivized to include as many legitimate transactions as&#xA;possible, but if propagation time is as big an issue as some of you have&#xA;said it is, miners would also be incentivized to keep their blocks small&#xA;enough to propagate. So why not give them the choice? Once the block size&#xA;gets too big to propagate effectively, miners would be naturally&#xA;incentivized to limit how much data they put in each block, finding the&#xA;perfect balance.&#xA;&#xA;In my opinion, none of the downsides presented so far have been a good&#xA;argument. Risk of a 51% attack is not unique to this proposal, saying &#34;we&#xA;could also do that with hardcoded limits&#34; doesn&#39;t actually point out any&#xA;problem with this proposal, and miners already have the ability to add or&#xA;withhold transactions from their blocks.&#xA;&#xA;We trust our miners to serve us by acting in their own best interests, and&#xA;this proposal simply gives them more options for doing that. If anyone can&#xA;make a strong argument against that would earn top marks in a high school&#xA;debate class, I&#39;d love to hear it!&#xA;&#xA;James&#xA;&#xA;On Sun, Dec 11, 2016 at 3:23 PM s7r via bitcoin-dev &lt;&#xA;bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org&gt; wrote:&#xA;&#xA;&gt; Andrew Johnson wrote:&#xA;&gt; &gt; &#34;You miss something obvious that makes this attack actually free of cost.&#xA;&gt; &gt; Nothing will &#34;cost them more in transaction fees&#34;. A miner can create&#xA;&gt; &gt; thousands of transactions paying to himself, and not broadcast them to&#xA;&gt; &gt; the network, but hold them and include them in the blocks he mines. The&#xA;&gt; &gt; fees are collected by him because transactions are included in a block&#xA;&gt; &gt; that he mined and the left amount is in another wallet of the same&#xA;&gt; &gt; person. Repeat this continuously to fill blocks.&#34;&#xA;&gt; &gt;&#xA;&gt; &gt; This is easily detectable as long as the network isn&#39;t heavily&#xA;&gt; &gt; partitioned(which is an assumption we make today in order for&#xA;&gt; &gt; transaction propagation to work reliably as well as for xThin and&#xA;&gt; &gt; CompactBlocks to work effectively to reduce block transmission time).&#xA;&gt; &gt; Other miners would have an incentive to intentionally orphan blocks that&#xA;&gt; &gt; contained a large number of transactions that their nodes were unaware&#xA;&gt; of.&#xA;&gt; &gt;&#xA;&gt; &gt; I don&#39;t think this sort of attack would last long.  Even later when&#xA;&gt; &gt; subsidies are drastically reduced, you would still lose out on&#xA;&gt; &gt; significant genuine fee revenue if your orphan rate increased even&#xA;&gt; &gt; 10%(one out of ten of your poison blocks intentionally orphaned by&#xA;&gt; &gt; another miner).&#xA;&gt; &gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; I disagree.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; I didn&#39;t say this is impossible to detect, but it is hard to act against&#xA;&gt; it. One miner orphaning the block intentionally is very unlikely if that&#xA;&gt; miner acts rationally. It would only make sense if 51% of the hash rate&#xA;&gt; would intentionally orphan it. Otherwise the miner who intentionally&#xA;&gt; orphans a valid block, let&#39;s say block X, has to continue to mine one in&#xA;&gt; its place on top of block X-1, and by the time he finds one:&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; a) his block X&#39; is rejected by other miners because they already have a&#xA;&gt; valid block X on top of which they already started to mine;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; b) block X+1 was already found and broadcasted, so the miner who&#xA;&gt; orphaned X intentionally is on the shorter chain ignored by the network.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; So, one miner cannot do anything about it. Even a pool cannot do&#xA;&gt; anything about it, because the loss is greater. You need 51% of the hash&#xA;&gt; rate to intentionally orphan it, and all the miners forming 51% need to&#xA;&gt; be colluding and know for sure that every one will intentionally orphan&#xA;&gt; the said block, otherwise there&#39;s a huge risk of loss for who does it.&#xA;&gt; Nobody would gamble to do this (I am not sure if gambling is the right&#xA;&gt; word, since the loss is 100% sure here). But, we are not discussing 51%&#xA;&gt; attacks because those are a different topic.&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt; _______________________________________________&#xA;&gt; bitcoin-dev mailing list&#xA;&gt; bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org&#xA;&gt; https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev&#xA;&gt;&#xA;-------------- next part --------------&#xA;An HTML attachment was scrubbed...&#xA;URL: &lt;http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20161218/f08a63d8/attachment-0001.html&gt;</html></oembed>