BitShares Forum
Main => General Discussion => Topic started by: bytemaster on September 29, 2015, 09:31:31 pm
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http://bytemaster.github.io/update/2015/09/29/Bitcoin-is-100x-less-secure-than-commonly-believed/
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Shot through the heart and you're to blame
DAN you give BITCOIN... a bad name
An angel's SHARE is what you sell
You promise me heaven then put me through hell
Chains of love got a hold on me
When passion's a prison you can't break free
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S9tKwSboJeg
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Shot through the heart and you're to blame
DAN you give BITCOIN... a bad name
Bitcoin is awesome .. what is bad is *pooled* mining.
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What are the chances that mining pools come up with a fix or workaround for the negative mining problem? Also, I think your assumptions that price will drop solely because this attack is being attempted is flawed. To get a guaranteed drop in price, you will have to be certain that your attack will prove catastrophic, or nearly catastrophic to the Bitcoin network, with very little possibility of recovery.
IMO this is another one of your bad PR/FUD threads. I could be wrong, but I think there is a good chance that the bitcoin community could find a solution to this avenue of attack. I find it hard to believe that they would let a $3 bil industry go down the drain. I think its a good idea to identify problems in the industry, but you should portray it as a possible attack vector that the bitcoin community may want to explore, instead of a guaranteed failure like this:
"Once someone develops a business plan that can benefit from gaining control of Bitcoin’s block production it will be done and no amount of hash power will be able to prevent it."
because there is no guarantee that this attack will work in practice. It hasn't happened for bitcoin's nearly seven years in existence.
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Solutions to negative mining:
1. change the POW algorithm to one that requires the miner to have the private key that will receive the block reward
2. provide access controls to your pool and do Know your Miner verification
3. have the mining hardware itself report directly to the pool and only allow hardware that implements a proprietary protocol. Effectively the mining pool must have full control over the entire connection.
So my point remains that until a solution is found and implemented negative mining remains a problem.
Short selling isn't even necessary for the attack, it is just a bonus.
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The first argument everyone makes is that miners would switch pools if any pool started censoring transactions. This may be true, but to keep an objective measure of security we must assume they would only switch if it were profitable to do so.
With that objective measure of security, what about this attack?
1) Create n new pools
2) Provide a 0.1% subsidy for blocks found by each of the new pools
3) By definition, all miners would switch to one of your new pools, because they would maximize profit by doing so
4) ? ? ?
5) Profit
The attacker would have 100% of the hash rate, for a cost of $8640/day. It sounds absurd because it is. Or is it?
Also, what about this bounty to Bitcoin XT blocks, currently 1.3 BTC? https://cryptoplay.net/vote/ Why hasn't it been snapped up? The "objective measure" rule would say this free money should not remain on the table.
Or this bounty? https://www.bigblockbounty.com/ Would this line of thinking predict that the 4+ BTC reward for 100 XT blocks would be quickly claimed?
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Assuming they could do it, why would you expose yourself and let everyone know you are? It's more profitable to not tell anyone what you are doing than expose yourself.
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The first argument everyone makes is that miners would switch pools if any pool started censoring transactions. This may be true, but to keep an objective measure of security we must assume they would only switch if it were profitable to do so.
With that objective measure of security, what about this attack?
1) Create n new pools
2) Provide a 0.1% subsidy for blocks found by each of the new pools
3) By definition, all miners would switch to one of your new pools, because they would maximize profit by doing so
4) ? ? ?
5) Profit
The attacker would have 100% of the hash rate, for a cost of $8640/day. It sounds absurd because it is. Or is it?
Also, what about this bounty to Bitcoin XT blocks, currently 1.3 BTC? https://cryptoplay.net/vote/ Why hasn't it been snapped up? The "objective measure" rule would say this free money should not remain on the table.
Or this bounty? https://www.bigblockbounty.com/ Would this line of thinking predict that the 4+ BTC reward for 100 XT blocks would be quickly claimed?
There are several things going on here:
1. The rewards offered are driven by donations and not a long-standing and sustainable offer
2. The cost to update the mining pool software is greater than the one time reward.
If those bounties were a promise of $8700/day divided among conforming blocks and you have a mining pool that finds 1 block per day on average, then you will double your money by conforming. Except that it is not just doubling the money earned by this miner (assuming 5% margins) this particular bounty would be increasing the profits of the first miner to switch from $300 to $9000 which represents a 30x increase in profitability by switching.
So clearly someone will take that bate and produce 0.7% of the blocks. The market never likes to leave anyone with such high margins, so miners will switch from the main network to the conforming network (merging mining) until the profit from mining under the alternative rules falls to some threshold. If you assume miners will continue switching so long as it doubles their margin from $300/block to $600/block then an attacker will have gain 20% of the miners for the cost of 0.7% of the hash power.
The market will then provide feedback to the attacker which can increase their daily pay until all miners switch.
Providing incentives to attack only makes sense to the extent that it is cheaper than than undermining the support of the main chain. Stated another way, offering to double your salary may not get as many defectors as threatening to make your salary negative. So long as you are earning a safe income and able to pay your bills you can entirely ignore the attacker.
Enter negative mining. For $8000 per day spent on negative mining you can reduce the income of everyone else mining in public pools by 50%. (For $5000 per day you can cut income by 20%) Such a huge decline in income would cause almost all other miners to be operating at a loss. Once this happens these miners turn off their equipment. They have no financial incentive to SPEND money to defend the network.
So if your ONLY goal was to stop block production, then it would only cost you between $5000 and $8000 per day.
Now if you have a lot of mining equipment and no longer had the ability to mine in the pools and the attacker offers you your old job back *IF* you mine for them now it is a question of 0 income and a complete loss on your capital investment or some income. It now becomes clear that not joining the attacker is irrational from a profit-seeking point of view. You could walk away in protest (not wanting to take dirty money) but that only harms you and doesn't help the network.
Now this is where it gets really interesting... an attacker can approach the largest mining pool and make them an offer they cannot refuse, "You can either censor transactions and make more money, or suffer a negative mining attack that will put you out of business". Once a single pool caves into the demands, the that pool can be used against the other pools. If no pools cave, then the attacker needs to rent hashing power for his attack.
Conclusion: The Bitcoin network is only as secure as the profit margins on mining, not the cost of mining. The lower the profit margins fall the cheaper it becomes to perform the negative mining attack.
Mining pools would have to come up with a defense against negative mining which is not trivial.
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So my point remains that until a solution is found and implemented negative mining remains a problem.
And my point remains that this problem is probably lower on the priority scale right now. Right now, if you really want to attack bitcoin, your best bet is to attempt to prevent raising the block size limit by spoofing core nodes, DDOSing XTnodes, and spreading fud about a blocksize limit increase. Bitcoin is not going anywhere with just 3-4tx/sec even if lighting network, side chains, or any other scaling solutions are implemented. So your attack is essentially free and the attackers seem to be doing a pretty good job so far. You won't destroy bitcoin but you can prevent it from growing. I would argue that the attackers are winning in bitcoin as we speak for neligible cost.
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So my point remains that until a solution is found and implemented negative mining remains a problem.
And my point remains that this problem is probably lower on the priority scale right now. Right now, if you really want to attack bitcoin, your best bet is to attempt to prevent raising the block size limit by spoofing core nodes, DDOSing XTnodes, and spreading fud about a blocksize limit increase. Bitcoin is not going anywhere with just 3-4tx/sec even if lighting network, side chains, or any other scaling solutions are implemented. So your attack is essentially free and the attackers seem to be doing a pretty good job so far. You won't destroy bitcoin but you can prevent it from growing. I would argue that the attackers are winning in bitcoin as we speak for neligible cost.
Perhaps, the goal of my attack isn't to STOP bitcoin, but to take it over and profit by taking it in a new direction.
Those that want a larger block size simply need to start executing the negative mining attack against any pool that does not support the change.
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http://bytemaster.github.io/update/2015/09/29/Bitcoin-is-100x-less-secure-than-commonly-believed/
Shared on Linkedin and Facebook
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Conclusion: The Bitcoin network is only as secure as the profit margins on mining, not the cost of mining. The lower the profit margins fall the cheaper it becomes to perform the negative mining attack.
Does "negative mining" ever become a profitable attack, in and of itself? I thought I recalled seeing a paper on that in the past months, describing how a pool could increase income by this method, allocating a portion of its hashing against an enemy pool.
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Conclusion: The Bitcoin network is only as secure as the profit margins on mining, not the cost of mining. The lower the profit margins fall the cheaper it becomes to perform the negative mining attack.
Does "negative mining" ever become a profitable attack, in and of itself? I thought I recalled seeing a paper on that in the past months, describing how a pool could increase income by this method, allocating a portion of its hashing against an enemy pool.
Suppose mining profit margin is 5%
Suppose you have a mining pool with 20% of the hash power, you would normally produce 70 blocks per day and if you charge a 1.5% fee your pool profit would be 26.5 BTC per day and your pools revenue would be 1750 BTC
Suppose you direct 25% of your hash power (5%) of the total at all competing pools, you will now produce 52 blocks per day directly, and 17.1 blocks per day indirectly (from other pools) and your pools revenue would be 1727.5 a reduction in revenue of 22.5 BTC which means your pool would STILL be profitable even while performing this attack.
After you have performed this attack your competitors start losing miners and you start gaining miners. If you grow your pool from 20% to 40% as a result of this attack then it is clearly a net gain because your final profit will be 30.5 BTC per day, an increase in profit of 15%.
However, as your pool grows from 20% to 40% the amount of negative mining you must do decreases by 50% while keeping your competitors operating at a loss. This means your costs fall by 11.25 and your final net profit is 41.75 an increase in profit of 57%.
If your competitors attempt to use negative mining against you then it is simply a matter of redirecting their negative mining back at them. What we can conclude from this is a race to the bottom where the largest starting pool wins all.
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This is kind of a strange discussion because Satoshi always made these assumptions saying most of the network will be honest miners, but this seems to make the opposite assumption, that everyone, or a significant portion of the network will coalesce into this strategy.
For example, when faking shares vulnerabilities are discovered for pools, the majority of the entire network is not doing it, just a small percent of people (usually Russians)
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=224019.0
I guess the summary of this thread is saying that since a financial motive exists, eventually it will occur. This isn't like stake grinding though, where you can absolve yourself of responsibility by claiming it's a victimless optimization, this is an actual attack where you can probably identify who is attacking you and take counter measures.
This seems like it's only game over for Bitcoin if you own the largest pool and your pool is not composed of transient miners, otherwise the miners would just play musical chairs until they reach consensus on which honest pools exist at the time. If you own the largest pool and it's not full of transient miners, you would likely just lure miners to your pool to perform a 51% attack instead of this strategy.
I think the problem that Satoshi didn't solve Byzantine generals and Bitcoin is wide open to Sybil attack is a worse problem than the one brought up in this thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1183043
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Conclusion: The Bitcoin network is only as secure as the profit margins on mining, not the cost of mining. The lower the profit margins fall the cheaper it becomes to perform the negative mining attack.
Does "negative mining" ever become a profitable attack, in and of itself? I thought I recalled seeing a paper on that in the past months, describing how a pool could increase income by this method, allocating a portion of its hashing against an enemy pool.
Suppose mining profit margin is 5%
Suppose you have a mining pool with 20% of the hash power, you would normally produce 70 blocks per day and if you charge a 1.5% fee your pool profit would be 26.5 BTC per day and your pools revenue would be 1750 BTC
Suppose you direct 25% of your hash power (5%) of the total at all competing pools, you will now produce 52 blocks per day directly, and 17.1 blocks per day indirectly (from other pools) and your pools revenue would be 1727.5 a reduction in revenue of 22.5 BTC
a reduction in revenue of 22.5 BTC
What about a way to directly increase revenue by sharing in the target pool's revenues, while contributing nothing to the other miners in the enemy pool? That's what I thought I remembered, but it only works if the target is a huge pool. Anyone?
I guess I don't know exactly how rewards for not finding a block work. Why couldn't you negative mine against all pools, simultaneously, reusing the same hashpower? Just submit the same work to all the pools.
If negative mining is a losing proposition outside of explicit blockchain takeovers, or advertising your not-attacked-but-fee-charging pool, I can see why it hasn't caught on very much yet.
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Conclusion: The Bitcoin network is only as secure as the profit margins on mining, not the cost of mining. The lower the profit margins fall the cheaper it becomes to perform the negative mining attack.
Does "negative mining" ever become a profitable attack, in and of itself? I thought I recalled seeing a paper on that in the past months, describing how a pool could increase income by this method, allocating a portion of its hashing against an enemy pool.
Suppose mining profit margin is 5%
Suppose you have a mining pool with 20% of the hash power, you would normally produce 70 blocks per day and if you charge a 1.5% fee your pool profit would be 26.5 BTC per day and your pools revenue would be 1750 BTC
Suppose you direct 25% of your hash power (5%) of the total at all competing pools, you will now produce 52 blocks per day directly, and 17.1 blocks per day indirectly (from other pools) and your pools revenue would be 1727.5 a reduction in revenue of 22.5 BTC
a reduction in revenue of 22.5 BTC
What about a way to directly increase revenue by sharing in the target pool's revenues, while contributing nothing to the other miners in the enemy pool? That's what I thought I remembered, but it only works if the target is a huge pool. Anyone?
I guess I don't know exactly how rewards for not finding a block work. Why couldn't you negative mine against all pools, simultaneously, reusing the same hashpower? Just submit the same work to all the pools.
If negative mining is a losing proposition outside of explicit blockchain takeovers, or advertising your not-attacked-but-fee-charging pool, I can see why it hasn't caught on very much yet.
I think you're thinking of selfish mining, which is just delaying the release of a mined block to get a head start on the next one.
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Somehow, this thread makes me recall Rune's idea for a takeover bid.
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Somehow, this thread makes me recall Rune's idea for a takeover bid.
Yes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinUpgrade/comments/2mlkn5/how_and_what/
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Somehow, this thread makes me recall Rune's idea for a takeover bid.
I was thinking the SAME thing as soon as I saw it.
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Somehow, this thread makes me recall Rune's idea for a takeover bid.
Yes:
https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinUpgrade/comments/2mlkn5/how_and_what/
I recall this one: https://bitsharestalk.org/index.php?topic=7003.0
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Yes, this argument is very much a clone of Rune's old argument, and it falls down in exactly the same way, once you strip away all the complicated sounding wording:
* A mining pool is no different to a single, powerful bitcoin miner
* All the miners in bitcoin collectively spend 25 BTC per block on block production
* In order to turn a miner 'to the dark side', you must bribe them with more than their expected block reward
* In order to turn a majority of miners, you need to spend more than the entire network does every block
This is the 51% attack, nothing new.
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Yes, this argument is very much a clone of Rune's old argument, and it falls down in exactly the same way, once you strip away all the complicated sounding wording:
* A mining pool is no different to a single, powerful bitcoin miner
* All the miners in bitcoin collectively spend 25 BTC per block on block production
* In order to turn a miner 'to the dark side', you must bribe them with more than their expected block reward
* In order to turn a majority of miners, you need to spend more than the entire network does every block
This is the 51% attack, nothing new.
You don't need to spend more than the entire network to pull this off. An attacker only needs to spend enough to make mining unprofitable UNLESS you mine for them.
In other words, as profit margins decrease (due to free market competition) the cost of attacking the network decreases by a factor of X^2
If you have 5% profit margins, then I can make the network unprofitable for all pool miners for just $2000 per day.
If you have 1% profit margins, then I can make the network unprofitable for all pool miners for under $100 per day.
The only defense the network has is to eliminate the use of public pools where anyone can join. Once you eliminate public pools you are left with at most 10 private pools because if you have pools smaller than 10% of the hash power then your variance will eat up any remaining profit margins and thus make it unprofitable.
Conclusion from this is that the cost of attacking the network is the cost bribing / coercing 10 people and these 10 people could easily collude. Might as well have them simply SIGN the blocks rather than spend energy mining them. After all they could easily double spend at will by arbitrarily reversing the bitcoin blockchain by simply stopping production on the real chain and producing a fork.
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You don't need to spend more than the entire network to pull this off. An attacker only needs to spend enough to make mining unprofitable UNLESS you mine for them.
So, you pay miners to not hash - and guess what the price will be?
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You don't need to spend more than the entire network to pull this off. An attacker only needs to spend enough to make mining unprofitable UNLESS you mine for them.
So, you pay miners to not hash - and guess what the price will be?
Exactly, by paying the miners NOT to hash you remove them from the competition, then you PAY them to hash for you.
Effectively miners only have one choice, hash for you or go home. If the price crashes as a result of such an attack then the attack just got cheaper because profit margins will disappear.
Now if you execute this attack just after a reward halving then it is even easier. When the mining reward falls in half margins get crushed.
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Exactly, by paying the miners NOT to hash you remove them from the competition, then you PAY them to hash for you.
So, you buy their hashing power... how is this not just paying for majority hash?
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Yes, this argument is very much a clone of Rune's old argument, and it falls down in exactly the same way, once you strip away all the complicated sounding wording:
* A mining pool is no different to a single, powerful bitcoin miner
* All the miners in bitcoin collectively spend 25 BTC per block on block production
* In order to turn a miner 'to the dark side', you must bribe them with more than their expected block reward
* In order to turn a majority of miners, you need to spend more than the entire network does every block
This is the 51% attack, nothing new.
You don't need to spend more than the entire network to pull this off. An attacker only needs to spend enough to make mining unprofitable UNLESS you mine for them.
In other words, as profit margins decrease (due to free market competition) the cost of attacking the network decreases by a factor of X^2
If you have 5% profit margins, then I can make the network unprofitable for all pool miners for just $2000 per day.
If you have 1% profit margins, then I can make the network unprofitable for all pool miners for under $100 per day.
The only defense the network has is to eliminate the use of public pools where anyone can join. Once you eliminate public pools you are left with at most 10 private pools because if you have pools smaller than 10% of the hash power then your variance will eat up any remaining profit margins and thus make it unprofitable.
Conclusion from this is that the cost of attacking the network is the cost bribing / coercing 10 people and these 10 people could easily collude. Might as well have them simply SIGN the blocks rather than spend energy mining them. After all they could easily double spend at will by arbitrarily reversing the bitcoin blockchain by simply stopping production on the real chain and producing a fork.
You could use the analogy of, "I don't have to run faster than the bear, I just need to run faster than you!"
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Exactly, by paying the miners NOT to hash you remove them from the competition, then you PAY them to hash for you.
So, you buy their hashing power... how is this not just paying for majority hash?
Assuming 5% profit margin:
All miners are currently paying an electric bill of $6000 every 10 minutes and earning BTC worth $6300 for a net profit of $300.
It is commonly believed that an attacker would have to spend $6001 every 10 minutes to get 50.01% away from these miners.
Technically speaking the attacker only needs to pay the existing miners $1 more every 10 minutes and the miners could defect for a higher pay rate and the attacker gives them a long-term contract for $301 every 10 minutes for their hash power. The long-term contract protects the miners against any volatility in BTC price as a result of the attack resulting in the attacker having total costs of $1 + $300*PERCENT_DECLINE_IN_BTS_PRICE as a result of the attack.
Miners have a business model with ever-decreasing profit margins so their job positions have ever decreasing salaries. Therefore there is no long-term upside to supporting BTC for miners and they would be foolish to not sell out to someone offering them a better long-term income.
Negative mining is just an approach to push pools out of business and concentrate power in the hands of large mining farms which you can then negotiate with.
A large mining farm would be foolish to do anything other than negative mining on the public pools. Large public pools serve to allow more competition and thus lower overall margins.
Hence if I owned 10% of all hashing power, I would use it entirely for negative mining until the pools collapsed and then switch to solo-mining. This would maximize my long-term profits and secure my position of control.
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Conclusion from this is that the cost of attacking the network is the cost bribing / coercing 10 people and these 10 people could easily collude.
Thank goodness the BTS 2.0, 17 witness network can't be attacked by bribing/coercing 10 people :)
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We are not paying $864,000/day to have that level of security. ;D
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Exactly, by paying the miners NOT to hash you remove them from the competition, then you PAY them to hash for you.
So, you buy their hashing power... how is this not just paying for majority hash?
Assuming 5% profit margin:
All miners are currently paying an electric bill of $6000 every 10 minutes and earning BTC worth $6300 for a net profit of $300.
It is commonly believed that an attacker would have to spend $6001 every 10 minutes to get 50.01% away from these miners.
Technically speaking the attacker only needs to pay the existing miners $1 more every 10 minutes and the miners could defect for a higher pay rate and the attacker gives them a long-term contract for $301 every 10 minutes for their hash power. The long-term contract protects the miners against any volatility in BTC price as a result of the attack resulting in the attacker having total costs of $1 + $300*PERCENT_DECLINE_IN_BTS_PRICE as a result of the attack.
Miners have a business model with ever-decreasing profit margins so their job positions have ever decreasing salaries. Therefore there is no long-term upside to supporting BTC for miners and they would be foolish to not sell out to someone offering them a better long-term income.
Negative mining is just an approach to push pools out of business and concentrate power in the hands of large mining farms which you can then negotiate with.
A large mining farm would be foolish to do anything other than negative mining on the public pools. Large public pools serve to allow more competition and thus lower overall margins.
Hence if I owned 10% of all hashing power, I would use it entirely for negative mining until the pools collapsed and then switch to solo-mining. This would maximize my long-term profits and secure my position of control.
I knew it was wasteful, but didn't realize the numbers were that tight. What's your sense of the halving ~ August 2016? Is the market going to price that in or will it ultimately make mining Bitcoin unprofitable?
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I knew it was wasteful, but didn't realize the numbers were that tight. What's your sense of the halving ~ August 2016? Is the market going to price that in or will it ultimately make mining Bitcoin unprofitable?
I know you asked BM. With the same level of average new demand but half the mining cost the price could in theory double.
If we look at the recent Litecoin halving. The price averaged circa $60 million for the first 6 months of the year. After their halving, for the last 6 weeks or so the price has averaged $120 million.
Which is what I kind of expected.
Regards LTC. It settled in the $50-60 million range for the majority of this year. With 30% annual inflation that implies an average of $1-1.5 Million in new demand every month to offset sales of newly generated coins. All else being equal after the halving LTC could sustain twice the price, $120 million with the same level of demand.
However all else is not equal, there has been the greek crisis, Chinese market problems, BTC problems and also an LTC ponzi which has increased demand and influenced the price positively.
So in terms of how high LTC can go in the short term it's highly influenced by external events but I think it can sustain at least $120 million with the same level of average new demand that it had in the first half of 2015.
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In terms of odd numbers that don't look ridiculous or small, 25 and 33 look a hell of a lot better.
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All miners are currently paying an electric bill of $6000 every 10 minutes and earning BTC worth $6300 for a net profit of $300.
You make the wrong assumption that all miners together pay $6000 every 10 minutes!!! How do you know that?
I say that many miner's steal electricity and they mine for free! So the real average cost of miners could be in reality something like $3000 for example or whatever....
And the victims can not stop mining (indirectly) since they don't know they are victims.... (even we can be victims cause we are mining bitcoins because of a virus mining software installed on our computers)
I personally have no doubts that electricity costs are for many miners near zero....
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In terms of prime numbers that don't look ridiculous or small, 25 and 33 look a hell of a lot better.
Niether of those numbers are prime.
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BTC is wasting energy, that's right.
but why the marketing can support the price? just the fee of electricity? obsolutely not. we should understand that. there're a lot of interest groups backed behind. miners, traders, some related company are part of the groups. it's a benefits chain, they will let the bitcoin system safe.
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A negative miner is one who joins a pool, collects their share, but never returns a wining hash
Aren't pool rewards paid out per share? One share is a solved POW, so if you don't submit a winning hash, you don't have a share in the first place.
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A negative miner is one who joins a pool, collects their share, but never returns a wining hash
Aren't pool rewards paid out per share? One share is a solved POW, so if you don't submit a winning hash, you don't have a share in the first place.
To calculate hash rate, pool miners turn in all hashes that meet a significantly lower difficulty level than the mined chain difficulty level to the pool. Pool payouts are based on how many of these easier hashes each miner submits, as they represent the amount of hash power each miner is contributing. Miners submitting every single hash regardless of its score would be horribly inefficient; they only submit hashes above the pools set difficulty level, so the vast majority of hashes submitted to the pool are above the pool difficulty but below the blockchain's current difficulty level.
A negative miner is a miner who adds an additional filter onto their mining software so that it submits only hashes that are between the pool difficulty and the chain difficulty, instead of all hashes above the pool difficulty. This will make very little difference in the miner's payouts from the pool, but it means that the miner is contributing no value at all to the pool.
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A negative miner is a miner who adds an additional filter onto their mining software so that it submits only hashes that are between the pool difficulty and the chain difficulty, instead of all hashes above the pool difficulty. This will make very little difference in the miner's payouts from the pool, but it means that the miner is contributing no value at all to the pool.
Understood. Wouldn't this kind of thing stand out statistically, though for any pool doing analysis on share submission?
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A negative miner is a miner who adds an additional filter onto their mining software so that it submits only hashes that are between the pool difficulty and the chain difficulty, instead of all hashes above the pool difficulty. This will make very little difference in the miner's payouts from the pool, but it means that the miner is contributing no value at all to the pool.
Understood. Wouldn't this kind of thing stand out statistically, though for any pool doing analysis on share submission?
Not really. A major reason for using pools is because you don't have enough hash power to get your own blocks regularly, so accumulating a large enough sample size to be statistically significant could take longer than the time frame of the attack. Even if it was detectable eventually (which is unlikely) the negative mining could be done anonymously with new accounts and proxies each time one was burned. There would be false positives from unlucky honest miners to sort out also.
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Statistically each member of a pool only finds a winning hash once every few years
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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I've just realised something interesting. Either:
1. No mining pools are aware of this exploit
2. Pools are already actively engaged in it
3. It doesn't work in practice
2 is particularly interesting - bytemaster's claim that all pools would be foolish not to engage in this attack against other pools leads to the implication that on the limit, all pools will already be doing this to all other pools. This includes bytemaster's evil subsidy pool, which would be vulnerable to the same attack, so in the end this attack is a zero sum game.
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I haven't seen BM for a few days. I miss him so much.
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Niether of those numbers are prime.
Meant two odd numbers. I read someone talking about 17 and the first two numbers that don't seem minuscule off the top of my head were 25 and 33. 31 is ok for prime numbres.
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In terms of prime numbers that don't look ridiculous or small, 25 and 33 look a hell of a lot better.
Niether of those numbers are prime.
haha you are right