Hi all,
I previously mentioned in a post that i believe that technically nodes are
capable of handling blocks an order of magnitude larger than the current
blocksize limit, the only missing thing was an incentive to run them. I have
been monitoring the blockchain for the past couple of weeks and am seeing that
even miners who have all the incentives are for whatever reason struggling to
download and validate much smaller blocks.
The data actually paints a very grim picture of the current
bandwidth/validating capacity of the global mining network.
See the following empty blocks mined despite a non-trivial elapsed time from
the previous block just from the past couple of days alone (Data from
insight.bitpay.com):
EmptyBlock /Time since previous block/ Size of previous block(bytes)/Mined
by====================================================370165 29s 720784
Antpool370160 31s 50129 BTCChinaPool370076 49s 469988 F2Pool370059 34s
110994 Antpool370057 73s 131603 Antpool
We have preceding blocks as small as 50KB with 30s passing and the miner
continues to mine empty blocks via SPV mining.
The most glaring case is Block 370057 where despite 73s elapsing and the
preceding block being a mere 131KB, the miner is unable to download/validate
fast enough to include transactions in his block. Unless ofcourse the miner is
mining empty blocks on purpose, which does not make sense as all of these pools
do mine blocks with transactions when the elapsed time is greater.
This is a cause for great concern, because if miners are SPV mining for a whole
minute for <750KB blocks, at 8MB blocks, the network will just fall apart as a
significant portion of the hashing power SPV mines throughout. All a single
malicious miner has to do is mine an invalid block on purpose, let these pools
SPV mine on top of them while it mines a valid block free of their competition.
Yes, these pools deserve to lose money in that event, but the impact of reorgs
and many block orphans for anyone not running a full node could be disastrous,
especially more so in the XT world where Mike wants everyone to be running SPV
nodes. I simply don't see the XT fork having any chance of surviving if SPV
nodes are unreliable.
And if these pools go out of business, it will lead to even more mining
centralization which is already too centralized today.
Can anyone representing these pools comment on why this is happening? Are these
pools on Matt's relay network?
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