The conversations that spawned from this paper have been fascinating to read, but I have a problem with the conclusions. To quote the paper:
"The Bitcoin ecosystem is open to manipulation, and potential takeover, by miners seeking to maximize their rewards. This paper presented Selfish-Mine, a mining strategy that enables pools of colluding miners that adopt it to earn revenues in excess of their mining power. Higher revenues can lead new rational miners to join sel sh miner pools, leading to a collapse of the decentralized currency." Please explain to me why any rational miner would collude to earn slightly higher short term profits at the expense of then wiping out the value of all their bitcoins in the long term. Also, if you felt that this vulnerability is an immediate danger to the Bitcoin network, why publish the vulnerability publicly rather than first disclosing it privately to the core developers? Apologies if you did disclose it privately in the past; I've seen no mention of it. -- Jameson Lopp Software Engineer Bronto Software On 11/05/2013 01:58 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote: > On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Alessandro Parisi <startit...@gmail.com> > wrote: >> this means that anytime a bug is found in Bitcoin protocol, chances are that >> it would take a lot more time to get fixed > > Correct. There is significant potential that a fix can create other > problems... and any major mistake could instantly destroy > $2 > billion worth of value. > ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ November Webinars for C, C++, Fortran Developers Accelerate application performance with scalable programming models. Explore techniques for threading, error checking, porting, and tuning. Get the most from the latest Intel processors and coprocessors. See abstracts and register http://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/clk?id=60136231&iu=/4140/ostg.clktrk _______________________________________________ Bitcoin-development mailing list Bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/bitcoin-development
