On Wed, Nov 06, 2013 at 10:15:40PM -0600, Kyle Jerviss wrote: > You are ignoring the gambler's ruin. We do not operate on an > infinite timeline. If you find a big pool willing to try this, > please give me enough advance warning to get my popcorn ready.
Gamblers ruin has nothing to do with it. At every point you want to evaluate the chance the other side will get ahead, vs. cashing in by just publishing the blocks you have. (or some of them) I didn't mention it in the analysis, but obviously you want to keep track of how much the blocks you haven't published are worth to you, and consider publishing some or all of your lead to the rest of the network if you stand to lose more than you gain. Right now it's a mostly theoretical attack because the inflation subsidy is enormous and fees don't matter, but once fees do start to matter things get a lot more complex. An extreme example is announce/commit sacrifices to mining fees: if I'm at block n+1, the rest of the network is at block n, and there's a 100BTC sacrifice at block n+2, I could easily be in a situation where I have zero incentive to publish my block to keep everyone else behind me, and just hope I find block n+2. If I do, great! I'll immediately publish to lock-in my winnings and start working on block n+3 Anyway, my covert suggestion that pools contact me was more to hopefully strike fear into the people mining at a large pool and get them to switch to a small one. :) If everyone mined solo or on p2pool none of this stuff would matter much... but we can't force them too yet. -- 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org 0000000000000005713cac303bd2d529ebeffa82fff60be5307010a83933698d
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