<oembed><type>rich</type><version>1.0</version><author_name>npub17w8rw3wtcr03zdsdjhmcj37w0g6l79gsspleltsznexdktv0qw0qd3nc05</author_name><author_url>https://nostr.ae/npub17w8rw3wtcr03zdsdjhmcj37w0g6l79gsspleltsznexdktv0qw0qd3nc05</author_url><provider_name>njump</provider_name><provider_url>https://nostr.ae</provider_url><html>📅 Original date posted:2017-04-09&#xA;📝 Original message:Jorge,&#xA;&#xA;Why won&#39;t the attacker use asicboost too? (Please don&#39;t say because of&#xA;&gt; patents)&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&#xA;We&#39;re assuming the ASIC optimization in my example is incompatible with&#xA;ASICBoost. But if the new optimization were compatible with ASICBoost,&#xA;you&#39;re right, the network would be in an equivalent situation whether&#xA;ASICBoost was banned or not.&#xA;&#xA;I want to point out again that overt ASICBoost can be used on the network&#xA;today. My proposal is to bring ASICBoost usage out into the open vs hiding&#xA;it. Banning ASICBoost via protocol changes is another issue completely.&#xA;&#xA;Jimmy&#xA;&#xA;&#xA;&gt; On 9 Apr 2017 12:26 am, &#34;Jimmy Song&#34; &lt;jaejoon at gmail.com&gt; wrote:&#xA;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt; Jorge,&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt; Suppose someone figures out an ASIC optimization that&#39;s completely&#xA;&gt;&gt; unrelated that gives X% speed boost over your non-ASICBoosted&#xA;&gt;&gt; implementation. If you ban ASICBoost, someone with this optimization can&#xA;&gt;&gt; get 51% of the network by adding N machines with their new optimization. If&#xA;&gt;&gt; you allow ASICBoost and assuming this gets a 20% speed boost over&#xA;&gt;&gt; non-ASICBoosted hardware, someone with this optimization would need 1.2N&#xA;&gt;&gt; machines to get 51%. The network in that sense is 20% stronger against this&#xA;&gt;&gt; attack in terms of cost.&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt; Jimmy&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt; On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 12:22 PM, Jorge Timón &lt;jtimon at jtimon.cc&gt; wrote:&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; To be more specific, why &#34;being higher will secure the Bitcoin network&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; better against newer optimizations&#34;?&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; Or, to be more clear, let&#39;s forget about future &#34;optimizations&#34;, let&#39;s&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; just think of an attacker. Does asicboost being used by all miners&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; make the system more secure against an attacker? No, for the attacker&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; can use asicboost too.&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; What about the case when not all the miners are using asicboost? Then&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; the attacker can actually get an advantage by suing asicboost.&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; Sometimes people compare asicboost with the use of asics in general as&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; both providing more security for the network and users. But I don&#39;t&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; think this is accurate. The existence of sha256d asics makes an attack&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; with general purpose computing hardware (or even more specialized&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; architectures like gpgpu) much more expensive and unlikely. As an&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; alternative the attacker can spend additional resources investing in&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; asics himself (again, making many attacks more expensive and&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; unlikely).&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; But as far as I know, asicboost can be implemented with software&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; running on general purpose hardware that integrates with regular&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; sha256d asics. There is probably an advantage on having the asicboost&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; implementation &#34;in the same box&#34; as the sha256d, yet again the&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; attacker can invest in hardware with the competitive advantage from&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; having asicboost more intergrated with the sha256d asics too.&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; To reiterate, whether all miners use asicboost or only a subset of&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; them, I remain unconvinced that provides any additional security to&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; the network (to be more precise whether that makes &#34;tx history harder&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; to rewrite&#34;), even if it results on the hashrate charts looking &#34;more&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; secure&#34;.&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 6:27 PM, Jorge Timón &lt;jtimon at jtimon.cc&gt; wrote:&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt; On 8 Apr 2017 5:06 am, &#34;Jimmy Song via bitcoin-dev&#34;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt; &lt;bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org&gt; wrote:&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt; Praxeology Guy,&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt;&gt; Why would the actual end users of Bitcoin (the long term and short&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; term&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt;&gt; owners of bitcoins) who run fully verifying nodes want to change&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; Bitcoin&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt;&gt; policy in order to make their money more vulnerable to 51% attack?&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt; Certainly, if only one company made use of the extra nonce space, they&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; would&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt; have an advantage. But think of it this way, if some newer ASIC&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; optimization&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt; comes up, would you rather have a non-ASICBoosted hash rate to defend&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; with&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt; or an ASICBoosted hash rate? Certainly, the latter, being higher will&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; secure&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt; the Bitcoin network better against newer optimizations.&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt; &gt; Why?&#xA;&gt;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;&gt;&gt;&#xA;-------------- next part --------------&#xA;An HTML attachment was scrubbed...&#xA;URL: &lt;http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20170409/f13e9088/attachment.html&gt;</html></oembed>