it would be obvious that you were colluding with that pool. I'm not sure what you mean by "you" and "colluding". If mining pools did this, it would be a service they provided for a fee. Do you say the grocery store colludes with you when they check you out at the register? Everyone would be able to identify which transactions in the block sent all their inputs to transaction fees. Any given attacker may or may not be able to associate the input(s) used in those transactions with specific people. The outputs of the generation transaction would be correspondingly larger. Whether or not any specific output could be associated with the inputs would depend on exactly how the output sizes were arranged.
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Go ahead and say the magic words 'tor'. For my part I never trusted it. At least not for highly critical work. It being largely funded by the government to 'help Iranian dissidents' doesn't pass the smell test for me. But to each his own. I bet it's a lot more secure now after two critical OpenSSL bugs have been fixed. I'll feel a lot better about it if Tor ever switches to LibreSSL for encryption.
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I've given some serious consideration to just automatically clicking "ignore" on anyone with a PRIMEDICE ad in their sig so I don't have to see their crap any more. I've been doing that with anyone who has an annoying signature (colors/size). It's a lot easier to read threads, because it means reading 75%-90% fewer posts.
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But how can the pool check that the submitted (failed) hash is correct for that nonce, without redoing the work?
Pools require miners to submit shares, which are solutions that do not meet the difficulty criteria for the Bitcoin blockchain itself, but do meet some lower target established by the pool instead. A miner might need to calculate billions of hashes (not sure what share difficulty looks like these days) before they find a valid share. This means the pool operators only have to duplicate a tiny fraction of the work of the hashers.
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The following outputs can't be redeemed and may still be in the UXTO (simply because the client doesn't look for provably bad outputs to prune: 986 outputs with 32 bytes and no OP codes. 336 outputs with 36 bytes and no OP codes. 182 outputs with the gibberish script OP_IFDUP OP_IF OP_2SWAP OP_VERIFY OP_2OVER OP_DEPTH (the ASCII values for "script" was pushed rather than the actual script) 23 outputs with a single one byte zero as the PubKeyHash (oops) OP_DUP OP_HASH160 OP_0 OP_EQUALVERIFY OP_CHECKSIG Is there an automatic way to flag pubkey hashes which appear "fake", as in we're very confident that nobody possesses a corresponding private key? (1BitcoinEaterAddressDontSendf59kuE) Maybe some kind of entropy measurement?
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By the way, how does the pool make sure that each member is actually trying out all the nonces that he is supposed to try? The member has to submit each one to the pool in order to get credit for it.
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I presume that the destination address in the reward payoff transaction, at the start of the block, is specified by the pool, not chosen by the miner -- correct?
Yes, that's what makes pooled mining work at all. Miners* can't alter the generation transaction and still have their shares accepted. (*) whether or not it's accurate to call people who operate mining equipment and sell their hashing power to a pool instead of create their own blocks "miners" is a topic for another discussion.
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What if you aren't sending from a personal wallet (Bitcoin-QT, etc), rather from an exchange (Cryptsy, mint, etc)? In that situation would it still be possible to trace where it was sent from? Or, since it is the exchange's server sending the transaction, would it be anonymous? Network snooping will show the transaction coming from the exchange. The exchange, of course, knows it was your transaction and they'll have records showing such. The same people who engage in widespread network snooping probably can just ask the exchange to give them those records (or they'll hack into the exchange and just extract the records themselves). That's why I said if you use a web wallet you don't have any privacy.
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The more interesting thing is that is just became widely known just how little it costs it for a malicious miner to sabotage a mining pool via block withholding.
Is that like a worker at a diamond mine stealing a diamond that he dug out? More like a worker at a diamond vapourizing the diamond instead of digging it out of the ground. He still gets paid his wage (which is slightly diminished because the mine earned less) but the total harm caused to the mine is larger than the amount he gives up in income.
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Can you please explain why they are wrong?
To me it seems they make good points, but I am ready to learn more. Long story short, they make the same mistake in that post they accuse everybody else of making - assuming the situation is static instead of dynamic. Two things of interest happened recently. The least interesting one is that a pool got too big, again, and financial and social feedback was successful in changing their behaviour, just like every other time. The more interesting thing is that is just became widely known just how little it costs it for a malicious miner to sabotage a mining pool via block withholding. The Bitcoin mining ecosystem is now going to have to adjust to that that new knowledge, and the result might actually bring about the smaller pools everybody wants without any protocol changes at all. Also this: The guy has a history of spreading baseless bullshit to garner clicks. Just like the case of Professor Bitcorn, trolling Bitcoin seems to be good for an academic CV.
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I am not tech literate. You can run your entire internet connection using tor? Or, are you saying use tor when using btc services or online wallet an such?
(Please, no making fun of me, I admit to being mostly computer illiterate.) If you are running a Bitcoin node (this means Bitcoin-Qt, bitcoind, btcd, or I think Obelisk) on your own computer, and you are running a Tor client, then you can configure the Bitcoin node to only connect to the Bitcoin network via Tor. If you're using an online wallet, then you don't have any privacy anyway so it doesn't really matter if you use Tor to access it or not.
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Perhaps this will turn out to be just the sort of tool the Bitcoin community needs to keep mining pools from gaining too much market share? Or perhaps it will usher in a new stage of mining wars. Either way, it seems like it has the potential to alter the balance of power by giving the mining community some power to punish misbehaving pools. If a situation arises where it's no longer safe to accept hashing power from random members, then pools would have to restrict themselves to only working with trusted participants. Presumably that would make pools a lot smaller, and there'd be more of them.
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One way to mitigate someone passively snooping on the network level, and finding out who is the originator of transactions would be to encrypt peer to peer communications.
Attackers who set up nodes will have to set up a sufficient amount in order to provide acceptable confidence that peer they got the transaction from is indeed the originator of the transaction.
Tor communications are encrypted peer-to-peer. Set up your node to accept connections via a hidden service, and use -onlynet=tor to make sure you only connect to other hidden services. Now 100% of your peer-to-peer connections are encrypted.
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Arguably, Bitcoin users are supposed to change addresses over time. Public keys in bitcoin are ephemeral. It's broken and wrong to reuse them.
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I would NOT call any body stupid or their actions stupid b/c of religion Joining cults isn't an issue of intelligence. It's more a reflection of emotional health vs injury. Studies say otherwise. There has been a negative correlation between religion and IQ for the majority of test subjects. Do I really have to bring up the distinction between correlation and causation?
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This is try #2 for them. Their only chance of getting it right for once is via the stopped clock effect. Note that their first attempt was an even more blatant market manipulation scheme.
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I would NOT call any body stupid or their actions stupid b/c of religion Joining cults isn't an issue of intelligence. It's more a reflection of emotional health vs injury.
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