New Cornell Paper Suggests Mining Pools Will Shrink in Size
A newly published Cornell University paper suggests that Bitcoin mining pools should eventually become smaller in size. The author, Ittay Eyal, comes to this conclusion because he believes pools are incentivized to attack each other through a block withholding attack, making it risky to allow any unidentified miners to contribute to pooled mining. The paper, which is partly funded by the SWIFT Institute, examines the consequences of a block withholding attack in an environment with competing mining pools. In a block withholding attack, an individual miner makes it seem as if he is working....
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Assuming you haven't already heard of a paper released by two researchers at Cornell University yesterday that suggested the Bitcoin currency is susceptible to a little something called 'selfish mining,' I will do my best to give you the Spark Notes version. The paper - put together by Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer - explains that rogue mining pools could possibly keep the discovery of a Bitcoin block private whilst other mining pools look for that very same block - expending mining resources. The point in keeping the block private is to allow the described 'selfish' mining pool to get....
A new research paper argues that bitcoin mining pools can only co-exist peacefully if individual miners regularly switch pools and if pools erect sufficient defenses against attacks. If pools don't exhibit either of those properties, then they are liable to attack each other, the report finds. The paper's authors, Aron Laszka, Benjamin Johnson and Jens Grossklags, investigated the long-term effects of competition between bitcoin mining pools in a draft version of a study titled, 'When Bitcoin Mining Pools Run Dry'. The final version of the paper will be presented at the Workshop on Bitcoin....
There's been some talk in the news about a recently-published paper by two researchers at Cornell University (you can read more about that on our report here). Initially, leading Bitcoin scientist Gavin Andresen dismissed the report, but he's now issued a statement on the Bitcoin Foundation website: I've received a lot of requests for a response to an academic paper released a couple of days ago with the alarming title
A paper released yesterday by researchers Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer at Cornell University suggested a subtle new way in which the bitcoin mining network could be vulnerable to a form of economic attack called 'Selfish Mining'. Gavin Andresen, the lead developer of Bitcoin, was quick to dismiss the paper and its contents. Executive summary of Cornell paper: not a big deal even assuming their analysis is correct (I'm not yet convinced). - Gavin Andresen (@gavinandresen) November 5, 2013. Although a similar attack called the 'Mining Cartel Attack' was proposed as early as 2010, the new....
It is important to note these details are not officially confirmed by any of the Chinese mining pools right now. For those people who assumed the Bitcoin block size debate was settled once and for all, bust open the popcorn yet again. Chinese mining pools are colluding to hard fork and support 2MB blocks. In doing so, they would go against everything Bitcoin Core has been working on so far, and use Bitcoin Classic instead. The Bitcoin block size debacle has been a source of great controversy for nearly a year now. Many experts feel the Bitcoin block size needs to be increased, yet there....