rich1.0npub1fx98zxt3lzspjs5f4msr0fxysx5euucm29ghysryju7vpc9j0jzqtcl2d8https://nostr.ae/npub1fx98zxt3lzspjs5f4msr0fxysx5euucm29ghysryju7vpc9j0jzqtcl2d8njumphttps://nostr.ae📅 Original date posted:2017-04-08 📝 Original message:To be more specific, why "being higher will secure the Bitcoin network better against newer optimizations"? Or, to be more clear, let's forget about future "optimizations", let's just think of an attacker. Does asicboost being used by all miners make the system more secure against an attacker? No, for the attacker can use asicboost too. What about the case when not all the miners are using asicboost? Then the attacker can actually get an advantage by suing asicboost. Sometimes people compare asicboost with the use of asics in general as both providing more security for the network and users. But I don't think this is accurate. The existence of sha256d asics makes an attack with general purpose computing hardware (or even more specialized architectures like gpgpu) much more expensive and unlikely. As an alternative the attacker can spend additional resources investing in asics himself (again, making many attacks more expensive and unlikely). But as far as I know, asicboost can be implemented with software running on general purpose hardware that integrates with regular sha256d asics. There is probably an advantage on having the asicboost implementation "in the same box" as the sha256d, yet again the attacker can invest in hardware with the competitive advantage from having asicboost more intergrated with the sha256d asics too. To reiterate, whether all miners use asicboost or only a subset of them, I remain unconvinced that provides any additional security to the network (to be more precise whether that makes "tx history harder to rewrite"), even if it results on the hashrate charts looking "more secure". On Sat, Apr 8, 2017 at 6:27 PM, Jorge Timón <jtimon at jtimon.cc> wrote: > > > On 8 Apr 2017 5:06 am, "Jimmy Song via bitcoin-dev" > <bitcoin-dev at lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > > Praxeology Guy, > >> Why would the actual end users of Bitcoin (the long term and short term >> owners of bitcoins) who run fully verifying nodes want to change Bitcoin >> policy in order to make their money more vulnerable to 51% attack? > > > Certainly, if only one company made use of the extra nonce space, they would > have an advantage. But think of it this way, if some newer ASIC optimization > comes up, would you rather have a non-ASICBoosted hash rate to defend with > or an ASICBoosted hash rate? Certainly, the latter, being higher will secure > the Bitcoin network better against newer optimizations. > > > Why?