First of all I apologice due to the possible mistakes in my writing below, I am not a Bitcoin developer but I have some knowledge about it.
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We all know the recent news, Ghash pool controlling 51% of the hashrate. While some consider it a threat others think that is not harmful.
The thing is that we have to do something to stop this from happening again:
My proposal is to start thinking about miners that join a pool like independent miners and not slave miners, this includes creating a new mining protocol that does not rely on the pool sending the list of transactions to include in a block. Each individual miner has to collect transactions by his own and mine that, this can be achieved by running a full node or by running a SPV like node that ask other nodes for transactions.
Once this protocol is developed and standarised we as a community could require all pools to use it (because its better, because is more trustless...), not by imposing it but by recommending it.
Pool owners could send some instructions using this protocol to the miner about how many transactions to include per block (some pools want small blocks), how many 0 fee transactions to include, how much is the minimum fee per Kb to include transactions and some info about the Coinbase field in the block.
This way is impossible to perform some of the possible 51% attacks:
- A pool owner cant mine a new chain (selfish mining) (pool clients have a SPV or full node that has checkpoints and ask other peers about the length of the chain)
- A pool owner can't perform double spends or reverse transactions (pool clients know all the transactions relayed to the network, they know if they are already included on a block)
- A pool owner cant decide which transactions not to include (but they can configure the minimum fee).
- A pool owner cant get all the rewards by avoiding other pools from mining blocks (Because the pool client knows the last block independently that is from his pool or other).
The only thing that a 51% pool owner can do is to shut down his pool and drop the hashrate by 51% because he does not control the miners.
If the pool owner owns all the hardware in the pool my proposal is not valid, if the pool clients dont use this protocol my proposal is not valid.
I want to know if this is possible or its been developed or there is already a working protocol that works like this, also I want to read other people's ways to address this threat, thanks for reading.
