Bitcoin Mining Pools Attack When Threatened, Study Finds
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....
Related News
The cryptocoin universe is more than a little like the American west at the end of the 19th century. There are boomtowns like Paybase turning into real cities, ghost towns of defunct altcoin scams, and banditry is all too common. One form of banditry are attacks on mining pools, either by stealth or brute for DDoS. We know that this happens, but the nature of such conflict, as well as quantified fallout, are not well understood. When Bitcoin Mining Pools Run Dry (pdf) is a scholarly game theory paper on developing a model of mining pools in conflict. Scenarios Studied. The study examined....
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....
Many people don't know about the different types of mining pools out there. Multi-pools allow for mining multiple currencies based on profitability, some only focus on promising new coins, and some only focus on one particular coin as their whole purpose. Not only are there different mining pool types to choose from, but the payout methods are different, with PPLNS, PROP, and PPS being the most popular. This mining guide will clue you in on what pools are available to you, and what payout methods they use. A Guide to Different Cryptocurrency Mining Pools. Single Coin Mining Pools. Single....
Cryptocurrency mining has come a long way since Satoshi Nakamoto mined those very first Bitcoins using only CPU cycles. Background. The harnessing of graphic card GPUs pushed mining rates to Gigahashes per second, and recently, the development of ASICs made Terahash rates possible. Many miners either fell out of the race or were forced to form pools - combining their hashing power in order to mine profitably. So began the era of the mining pools, behind whose power to make or break small altcoins, lay a greater threat: the 51% Attack. More on that later. The sheer hashing difficulty and....
Currently, everyone’s been focused on the price of bitcoin and turbulent global markets. However, in the bitcoin mining and development space, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes. Smaller Mining Pools and Bitcoin Unlimited. As Bitcoin.com previously reported the bitcoin network’s hashrate distribution among mining pools has been changing. Lately,....