The presumption of the mining aspect of the Bitcoin security model is that the mining majority is a broadly distributed set of independent people, not one person who controls a majority of the hash power.
You seem to have overlooked a qualifier in your Satoshi quote: "...by nodes that are not cooperating to attack the network". A single miner with majority hash power is of course cooperating with himself. At that point the question of whether he is attacking the network is moot, it's his network. I believe that Pieter's point is that a system optimized for orphan rate may in effect be optimized for a single entity providing all double spend protection. That works directly against the central principle of Bitcoin security. The security of the money is a function of the number of independent miners and sellers. e > On Dec 10, 2016, at 7:17 PM, Daniele Pinna via bitcoin-dev > <[email protected]> wrote: > > How is the adverse scenario you describe different from a plain old 51% > attack? Each proposed protocol change where 51% or more of the network can > potentially game the rules and break the system should be considered just as > acceptable/unacceptable as another. > > There comes a point where some form of basic honesty must be assumed on > behalf of participants benefiting from the system working properly and > reliably. > > Afterall, what magic line of code prohibits all miners from simultaneously > turning all their equipment off... just because? > > Maybe this 'one': > > "As long as a majority of CPU power is controlled by nodes that are not > cooperating to attack the network, they'll generate the longest chain and > outpace attackers. The network itself requires minimal structure." > > Is there such a thing as an unrecognizable 51% attack? One where the > remaining 49% get dragged in against their will? > > Daniele > >> On Dec 10, 2016 6:39 PM, "Pieter Wuille" <[email protected]> wrote: >>> On Sat, Dec 10, 2016 at 4:23 AM, Daniele Pinna via bitcoin-dev >>> <[email protected]> wrote: >>> We have models for estimating the probability that a block is orphaned >>> given average network bandwidth and block size. >>> >>> The question is, do we have objective measures of these two quantities? >>> Couldn't we target an orphan_rate < max_rate? >> >> Models can predict orphan rate given block size and network/hashrate >> topology, but you can't control the topology (and things like FIBRE hide the >> effect of block size on this as well). The result is that if you're purely >> optimizing for minimal orphan rate, you can end up with a single >> (conglomerate of) pools producing all the blocks. Such a setup has no >> propagation delay at all, and as a result can always achieve 0 orphans. >> >> Cheers, >> >> -- >> Pieter >> > _______________________________________________ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
_______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list [email protected] https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev
