Co-ordinated DDoS on multiple mining pools

[theymos]

Is it possible to have a decentralized pool, or is a central authority required to ensure miners are honest?

It is possible to have a decentralized pool, but IMO building it would be a waste of time, since it will be too expensive to be a full Bitcoin node not too far in the future, and participants in a decentralized pool must be full nodes. A decentralized pool also requires a great deal of bandwidth itself, since all peers must understand the complete state of the pool (as far as I can tell).

One possible design:
- Each miner broadcasts all of the low-difficulty shares they win, which is used to calculate proper ratios for every participant.
- Each miner works on its own block. The coinbase transaction pays out according to ratios that it calculates. Each miner chooses which transactions to include according to its own rules.
- Miners broadcast their block headers, coinbase transactions, and Merkle branches for their coinbase transactions to the entire pool. The pool doesn't need to know which other transactions they include.
- When you receive a header+coinbase, you examine the payout ratios, and if you agree with them, you add the person who sent it to your own coinbase transactions for payout.

[hazek]

This way no evil person will know you're there and the variance is much lower.

Seriously? Evil vs good? You're really going to spin this?

Cut the bullshit please.

[hazek]

As for the DDoSing I'm split.

I already made a post about the danger of some pool getting too big and getting potentially dangerous so I like the fact that that's getting stopped. But as someone who believes in property rights and nonaggression principle I cannot condone using force to achieve it.

[airdata]

Is that what was going on last night when Slush and Deepbit both appeared to be down at the same time?

[lizthegrey]

Is it possible to have a decentralized pool, or is a central authority required to ensure miners are honest?

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ciKH3M8WYS49ywz08beXtvpCm2wVGdzU7waKwcn_uaU/edit?hl=en_US&authkey=CJTqyOMF#

[lizthegrey]

It is possible to have a decentralized pool, but IMO building it would be a waste of time, since it will be too expensive to be a full Bitcoin node not too far in the future, and participants in a decentralized pool must be full nodes. A decentralized pool also requires a great deal of bandwidth itself, since all peers must understand the complete state of the pool (as far as I can tell).

If you trust one person to distribute payouts, and you use a DHT with small replication (say, 10) rather than full replication, it's not quite so bad.

[AntiVigilante]

As for the DDoSing I'm split.

I already made a post about the danger of some pool getting too big and getting potentially dangerous so I like the fact that that's getting stopped. But as someone who believes in property rights and nonaggression principle I cannot condone using force to achieve it.

I'm for the non-initiation principle and the cessation of hostilities ASAP principle.

DDoS does not damage property. It only interferes with business. The result at worst is a delay of service.

Intrusion however is a different story. But that too can be minimal.