Selfish mining

[afbitcoins]

A new mining strategy has been discovered in which 'selfish' miners can benefit at the detriment of others.

Heres the research paper from the boffins at Cornell University
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243v2.pdf

 My opinion is that the proposed 'solution', a modification to the way bitcoin works, would be suicide.

I've written more on my blog here about why I think that but in short, they propose to make it so that only big mining pools can 'cheat' instead of everyone. No more level playing field for mining pools.

This gives incentive to everyone to join a big mining pool in order to reap the benefits of the selfish mining strategy. In other words the patch, far from helping things would almost guarantee centralised control to appear in short notice.

The alternative is that everyone can mine 'selfishly' if they choose to opening up interesting possibilities but hopefully allowing the network to remain decentralised.

Hoping to get some conversation on the topic here.

Thanks

http://afbitcoins.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/selfish-mining-possibilities-discovered/

[1713570294]

1713570294

[timeofmind]

You should probably read this thread:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=2227.0

This is an old topic that appears to have been extensively covered.

[bee7]

Also, check this thread: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324413.0

[afbitcoins]

Thanks for the links. The community is onto it, nice to see.

[digitalindustry]

A new mining strategy has been discovered in which 'selfish' miners can benefit at the detriment of others.

Heres the research paper from the boffins at Cornell University
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243v2.pdf

 My opinion is that the proposed 'solution', a modification to the way bitcoin works, would be suicide.

I've written more on my blog here about why I think that but in short, they propose to make it so that only big mining pools can 'cheat' instead of everyone. No more level playing field for mining pools.

This gives incentive to everyone to join a big mining pool in order to reap the benefits of the selfish mining strategy. In other words the patch, far from helping things would almost guarantee centralised control to appear in short notice.

The alternative is that everyone can mine 'selfishly' if they choose to opening up interesting possibilities but hopefully allowing the network to remain decentralised.

Hoping to get some conversation on the topic here.

Thanks

http://afbitcoins.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/selfish-mining-possibilities-discovered/

Dam, if only i had of went to University !

i would have been able to figure this stuff out . . .

all i have is this dam stamp with three stars and a smiley that proves I'm "just great!"

[digitalindustry]

just on an off note you boys hear about photoShares

causing a little stir over at that boring old sub-forum "Alternative Cryptocurrency"

its a "Memory Hard" Algorithm that seems to be able to have a disincentive to zombie Bot , and multiple instances.

it uses a lot of Ram , there is a 5K bounty for anyone that can "hack it "

i'm not involved in any way with it - its being dubbed "mPoW" momentum Proof of Work.

and ProtoShares are the "hardblock" to the scammy (in my opinion) "Bitshares"

even so this algo looks interesting.

lot of DigitalOcean on it at the moment and dif is about to explode but interesting also.