Bitcoin & KGW

[notbatman]

Sorry if this issue has already been addressed but,

I'm concerned that all the scam mining companies that have centralized mining might be paid off to attack the network by dropping several hundred petahashes thereby preventing any transactions from confirming and effectively killing Bitcoin. No confirmations for days/weeks would be devastating.

KGW should be added to the upcoming fork to prevent this kind of attack IMO.

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[cr1776]

A few links, this has been discussed:

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=499767.msg5514094#msg5514094

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=505138.msg5575252#msg5575252

These threads were just some of many.

:-)

[notbatman]

My feelings on the matter are that it's battle hardened technology at this point.

[Rannasha]

My feelings on the matter are that it's battle hardened technology at this point.

It having been used in a few mostly irrelevant altcoins doesn't make it battle hardened.

But the fact remains that there is no point in introducing this algorithm to Bitcoin. A 50% drop in hashrate within a single difficulty cycle seems completely unrealistic given current circumstances and even if it would occur, the current difficulty-adjustment-algorithm would work fine. Takes a bit longer, but that's all.

[DannyHamilton]

Sorry if this issue has already been addressed but,

I'm concerned that all the scam mining companies that have centralized mining might be paid off to attack the network by dropping several hundred petahashes thereby preventing any transactions from confirming and effectively killing Bitcoin. No confirmations for days/weeks would be devastating.

KGW should be added to the upcoming fork to prevent this kind of attack IMO.
[/quote

There are only approximately 290 petahashes per second running on the entire global network right now. Therefore, it is impossible for anyone to drop "several hundred".

If 145 petahashes of mining equipment were to be suddenly and instantly destroyed, the result would be that the average time between blocks would increase to 20 minutes (not days or weeks). And the difficulty would adjust within a month so that block times were back to 10 minutes again.  This wouldn't "destroy" Bitcoin.  Since there is such a high variance in the time between blocks already, most people wouldn't even notice a temporary increase to a 20 minute average.

[notbatman]

Sorry if this issue has already been addressed but,

I'm concerned that all the scam mining companies that have centralized mining might be paid off to attack the network by dropping several hundred petahashes thereby preventing any transactions from confirming and effectively killing Bitcoin. No confirmations for days/weeks would be devastating.

KGW should be added to the upcoming fork to prevent this kind of attack IMO.

There are only approximately 290 petahashes per second running on the entire global network right now. Therefore, it is impossible for anyone to drop "several hundred".

If 145 petahashes of mining equipment were to be suddenly and instantly destroyed, the result would be that the average time between blocks would increase to 20 minutes (not days or weeks). And the difficulty would adjust within a month so that block times were back to 10 minutes again.  This wouldn't "destroy" Bitcoin.  Since there is such a high variance in the time between blocks already, most people wouldn't even notice a temporary increase to a 20 minute average.

Losing 50% would result in 20 min block time, I guess that makes sense. Perhaps I've seen too many alts get totally screwed and forced to emergency fork to add KGW.

Is it really a bad idea to add it?

[notbatman]

Consider the following scenario:

a. Scam mining companies control 50% of the hashing power.

b. Scam mining companies build enough 14nm hashing power to more than double the network hash rate.

c. Scam mining companies put all the new 14nm hardware online all at once.

d. Difficulty level skyrockets.

e. Scam mining companies take all their hardware off-line.

f. Block generation time is extremely unlucky and what would normally be a 10 min confirmation time is an hour.

g. DDoS attacks on nodes skyrocket.

In this type of scenario is confirmation time really only 20 minuets?

[Rannasha]

Sorry if this issue has already been addressed but,

I'm concerned that all the scam mining companies that have centralized mining might be paid off to attack the network by dropping several hundred petahashes thereby preventing any transactions from confirming and effectively killing Bitcoin. No confirmations for days/weeks would be devastating.

KGW should be added to the upcoming fork to prevent this kind of attack IMO.

There are only approximately 290 petahashes per second running on the entire global network right now. Therefore, it is impossible for anyone to drop "several hundred".

If 145 petahashes of mining equipment were to be suddenly and instantly destroyed, the result would be that the average time between blocks would increase to 20 minutes (not days or weeks). And the difficulty would adjust within a month so that block times were back to 10 minutes again.  This wouldn't "destroy" Bitcoin.  Since there is such a high variance in the time between blocks already, most people wouldn't even notice a temporary increase to a 20 minute average.

Losing 50% would result in 20 min block time, I guess that makes sense. Perhaps I've seen too many alts get totally screwed and forced to emergency fork to add KGW.

Is it really a bad idea to add it?

The reason alts without KGW or something similar got screwed is because of multipools making up almost all the mining on these alts. One moment they had a high hashrate, then the difficulty spiked up, the multipools moved away and the hashrate dropped by 95%.

Such a scenario simply won't occur for Bitcoin. And changing the difficulty algorithm will require a hard fork, which is hard enough to do for actual improvements, let alone arbitrary additions that are most likely never needed.

Consider the following scenario:

a. Scam mining companies control 50% of the hashing power.

b. Scam mining companies build enough 14nm hashing power to more than double the network hash rate.

c. Scam mining companies put all the new 14nm hardware online all at once.

d. Difficulty level skyrockets.

e. Scam mining companies take all their hardware off-line.

f. Block generation time is extremely unlucky and what would normally be a 10 min confirmation time is an hour.

g. DDoS attacks on nodes skyrocket.

In this type of scenario is confirmation time really only 20 minuets?

What's the point? This would cost the "scam mining companies" a ton of money without them gaining anything. Also, the actual scam mining companies (I assume you mean cloud mining services) don't actually have hardware to mine with (which is where the "scam" part comes in).

[notbatman]

Sorry if this issue has already been addressed but,

I'm concerned that all the scam mining companies that have centralized mining might be paid off to attack the network by dropping several hundred petahashes thereby preventing any transactions from confirming and effectively killing Bitcoin. No confirmations for days/weeks would be devastating.

KGW should be added to the upcoming fork to prevent this kind of attack IMO.

There are only approximately 290 petahashes per second running on the entire global network right now. Therefore, it is impossible for anyone to drop "several hundred".

If 145 petahashes of mining equipment were to be suddenly and instantly destroyed, the result would be that the average time between blocks would increase to 20 minutes (not days or weeks). And the difficulty would adjust within a month so that block times were back to 10 minutes again.  This wouldn't "destroy" Bitcoin.  Since there is such a high variance in the time between blocks already, most people wouldn't even notice a temporary increase to a 20 minute average.

Losing 50% would result in 20 min block time, I guess that makes sense. Perhaps I've seen too many alts get totally screwed and forced to emergency fork to add KGW.

Is it really a bad idea to add it?

The reason alts without KGW or something similar got screwed is because of multipools making up almost all the mining on these alts. One moment they had a high hashrate, then the difficulty spiked up, the multipools moved away and the hashrate dropped by 95%.

Such a scenario simply won't occur for Bitcoin. And changing the difficulty algorithm will require a hard fork, which is hard enough to do for actual improvements, let alone arbitrary additions that are most likely never needed.

Consider the following scenario:

a. Scam mining companies control 50% of the hashing power.

b. Scam mining companies build enough 14nm hashing power to more than double the network hash rate.

c. Scam mining companies put all the new 14nm hardware online all at once.

d. Difficulty level skyrockets.

e. Scam mining companies take all their hardware off-line.

f. Block generation time is extremely unlucky and what would normally be a 10 min confirmation time is an hour.

g. DDoS attacks on nodes skyrocket.

In this type of scenario is confirmation time really only 20 minuets?

What's the point? This would cost the "scam mining companies" a ton of money without them gaining anything. Also, the actual scam mining companies (I assume you mean cloud mining services) don't actually have hardware to mine with (which is where the "scam" part comes in).

The costs involved would be a small price to pay to help secure the fiat scam network from a trustless monetary system. However, I think the point here is to deny service and cause long wait times; this is standard banking m.o..

The scam part of scam mining companies comes into play when they take customers money for miners to be delivered within specific timeframe and give them nothing and refuse refunds while running the hardware themselves.

Cloud mining is this same style of scam i.e. taking money and providing nothing of value under the guise of mining only without involving any hardware; this scam has much lower overhead. However, I was referring to the hardware scammers (as indicated by the reference to 14nm) in my scenario.