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From: Dave Hudson <dave@hashingit.com>
In-Reply-To: <66648462658adebb5e5be7fcba65e670@national.shitposting.agency>
Date: Mon, 11 May 2015 12:49:03 +0100
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References: <55505441.3010906@certimix.com>
	<20150511103402.GA21748@savin.petertodd.org>
	<66648462658adebb5e5be7fcba65e670@national.shitposting.agency>
To: insecurity@national.shitposting.agency
Cc: bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] Reducing the block rate instead of
	increasing the maximum block size
Precedence: list


> On 11 May 2015, at 12:10, insecurity@national.shitposting.agency =
wrote:
>=20
> On 2015-05-11 10:34, Peter Todd wrote:
>> How do you see that blacklisting actually being done?
>=20
> Same way ghash.io was banned from the network when used Finney attacks
> against BetCoin Dice.
>=20
> As Andreas Antonopoulos says, if any of the miners do anything bad, we
> just ban them from mining. Any sort of attack like this only lasts 10
> minutes as a result. Stop worrying so much.

This doesn't work because a large-scale miner can trivially make =
themselves look like a very large number of much smaller scale miners. =
Their ability to minimize variance comes from the cumulative totals they =
control so 10 pools of 1% of the network cumulatively have the same =
variance as 1 pool with 10% of the network. It's also very easy for =
miners to relay blocks via different addresses and the cost is minimal. =
The biggest cost would be in DDoS prevention and a miner that actually =
split their pool into lots of small fragments would actually give =
themselves the ability to do quite a lot of DDoS mitigation anyway. If =
no-one is doing this right now it's simply because they've not had the =
right incentives to make it worthwhile; if the incentives make it =
worthwhile then this is pretty trivial to do.

This is one area where anonymity on behalf of transaction validators and =
block makers essentially makes it pretty-much impossible to maintain any =
sort of sanctions against antisocial behaviour.=