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Solution to 51% attack?

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BiggieBitcoin

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I have listened to many proposed solutions (mostly on LTB!) . One solution that I have not heard of yet:

I was thinking that it would be in the community's best interest to only allow a mining pool to receive 20% of the block rewards. If the protocol could be changed by the majority of the miners so that after a pool gets 20% (of the block rewards for a day/144 blocks), they can still do the work, but will not get any additional block reward. This would highly incentive miners to not grow bigger then 20%. I know the protocol is fixed, but want to know if this could be implemented using a "soft fork"?

It doesn't have to be 20%, just wanted to plug a number in.

Posted on July 22, 2014 at 8:45 PM

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• irnhnve

  

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  How would you determine which pool got the reward for that day, would it be dependent on the size of the pool? If so, more people would mine on the larger pool, if not and it actually was randomly rewarded to different pools, it would be unfair since a pool with a tiny hashrate would be getting the majority of the rewards. Miners would also just switch back and forth between the 'pool of the day' to get the most profit early on, i.e. before everyone else switched over, so they could claim a larger share of that 20%.

  Switching of pools in general causes inefficiencies in the network since the amount of hashrate working on a block at any given point in time is in flux. A few large miners who switched mid-block would drastically decrease the chances of the remaining miners in finding the nonce for that block.

  Posted on July 22, 2014 at 8:57 PM
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• pika

  

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  @biggiebitcoin I have listened to many proposed solutions (mostly on LTB!) . One solution that I have not heard of yet:

  I was thinking that it would be in the community's best interest to only allow a mining pool to receive 20% of the block rewards. If the protocol could be changed by the majority of the miners so that after a pool gets 20% (of the block rewards for a day/144 blocks), they can still do the work, but will not get any additional block reward. This would highly incentive miners to not grow bigger then 20%. I know the protocol is fixed, but want to know if this could be implemented using a "soft fork"?

  It doesn't have to be 20%, just wanted to plug a number in.

  I think something like this would have to be a hard fork.

  Posted on July 22, 2014 at 9:05 PM
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• BiggieBitcoin

  

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  I didn't mean that 20% goes to one pool. I meant after a pool finds more then (29 of the last 144 blocks) that a block reward is simply not released. The miner fees would just carry over to the next block.

  I suppose that they would just turn off miners after they got 29 of the last 144 blocks, but there would be no reason to let that occur in the first place.

  Posted on July 22, 2014 at 9:08 PM
  Last Edited: July 22, 2014 at 9:13 PM
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• Mike

  

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  You're talking about severely limiting the revenue potential and adding even more randomness into a miner's income distribution. I don't think this would have ever been successfully implemented. Every industrial miner in the world would have rallied against you.

  Expected income is calculated on an averaged basis. So for every day that a pool only gets 1 block, they have another day where they get 50. (Just to throw numbers in). So if you propose to limit that to only 29 in a day, then their potential average revenue shrinks dramatically.

  Posted on July 22, 2014 at 9:23 PM
  Last Edited: July 22, 2014 at 9:25 PM
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• cryptofarmer

  

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  It's a tuff one to solve because all incentives talked about seem to lead to centralization.

  But what if a Qt wallet could distribute hashrates as evenly as possible over a community of pool operators.

  Giving all participating miners with similar rewards no matter which pool gets the hashrate and the miner also gets the same interface to see stats through the wallet.

  The pool operator gets to do his job without worrying about features because the wallet is the interface for the miner.

  Sounds like a win win situation to me.

  So is it possible or not?

  Posted on July 22, 2014 at 9:50 PM
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• dpc

  

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  Location: Central California

  @biggiebitcoin I have listened to many proposed solutions (mostly on LTB!) . One solution that I have not heard of yet:

  I was thinking that it would be in the community's best interest to only allow a mining pool to receive 20% of the block rewards. If the protocol could be changed by the majority of the miners so that after a pool gets 20% (of the block rewards for a day/144 blocks), they can still do the work, but will not get any additional block reward. This would highly incentive miners to not grow bigger then 20%. I know the protocol is fixed, but want to know if this could be implemented using a "soft fork"?

  It doesn't have to be 20%, just wanted to plug a number in.

  I think you accidentally hit on the main issue. Regardless of what the Satoshi white paper says, miners and the community have different interests and motives. Miners want to make money and get their hardware paid off in a short period of time. The community want's a secure network and long term stability. Miners would never go for this and they get to choose what changes get made to bitcoin.

  Yes, miners want bitcoin to be successful, but their first priority is short to mid term profitability.

  Posted on July 22, 2014 at 10:38 PM
  Last Edited: July 22, 2014 at 10:38 PM
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• headswim

  

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  @dpc I think you accidentally hit on the main issue. Regardless of what the Satoshi white paper says, miners and the community have different interests and motives. Miners want to make money and get their hardware paid off in a short period of time. The community want's a secure network and long term stability. Miners would never go for this and they get to choose what changes get made to bitcoin.

  Yes, miners want bitcoin to be successful, but their first priority is short to mid term profitability.

  I wouldn't go for it either and I only mine with around 3-4 Thash. The whole point of Bitcoin is not to impose arbitrary rules that benefit some and not others. It should be open and fair, which it is already. If people have a real concern with a 51% attack that use bitcoin, they should contribute to mining themselves. It's not terribly difficult.

  Mining is profitable on pretty much any scale with the right hardware, and I learned how to do everything through google searches with 0 programming knowledge in a few days.

  Posted on July 23, 2014 at 9:38 AM
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• TOPLEL

  

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  don't make the longest blockchain matter but only the one that is more legit by searching the address maybe and what the block cointain. is not that easy though

  Posted on July 30, 2014 at 8:57 AM
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• angrycanuck

  

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  Location: Canada

  Isn't there a coin already like this? Is split into 5 parts and a pool can only choose one part ensuring never being able to get 51%......

  If I could only remember the name.....

  Posted on July 30, 2014 at 9:09 AM
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• Centrin

  

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  The obvious way to stop 51% attacks are to always stop pools before they reach that size such as what happened the ghash.io.

  Posted on August 2, 2014 at 4:10 PM
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