Modeling Bitcoin Mining and Denial of Service
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....
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In addition to the KYC-free units of censorship-resistant internet money, mining bitcoin at home brings unique security threats.
Last week, the Bitcoin network suffered from a denial-of-service attack that forced the core development team to patch the core reference design. Details are sketchy. CoinDesk first received word of the problem from core developer Jeff Garzik. "Currently dealing with an ongoing, network-wide event," he told us in a hurried email. Last Friday, Gavin Andreesen announced a forthcoming 0.8.3 release of the reference implementation. "This will fix a denial of service attack that affects some network nodes," he said, adding that details would be released after the fix. Garzik differentiates....
KnCMiner, a company, based in Sweden, has unveiled their new line of Solar chips which will have a 16 nm process. Currently, most updated chips run on a 20 nm process. 20 nm process chips can achieve the efficiency of .7 W per Gh/s. 16 nm chips are believed to improve the efficiency of mining tenfold, resulting in an efficiency of .07 W per Gh/s. With these specifications, a 1.4 KW miner that could be powered by a standard home outlet could mine at 20 Th/s. KnCMiner’s new chips are planned for launch in Q1 of 2015. With rapid improvements in ASICs, Bitcoin miners will need to continually....
Distributed denial-of-service attacks have posed an increasingly severe problem for cryptocurrency exchanges and mining pools in recent weeks. Last month, several major pools in the mining community suffered debilitating DDoS attacks that resulted in significant delays, lost mining time and frustration for miners. In extreme cases, as explained by TeamDoge administrator Forrest Fuqua, some pools received ransom messages from hackers demanding payoffs in exchange for pulling back their attacks. Fuqua said that security flaws in the Mining Portal Open Source (MPOS) pool software commonly....
A number of users have taken to social media to report issues with their Blockchain.info wallets on Monday. The reason, according to Blockchain, relates to what has been described as "higher than usual traffic volumes due to DDoS [distributed denial of service] attacks" on the company's servers. Upon this writing, the website presents the following message: Blockchain.info is currently down for maintenance. For status updates please see Twitter. Apologies for any inconvenience. The company took the opportunity to remind users that their wallets were safe, but made the suggestion that all....