Post
Topic
Board Development & Technical Discussion
Re: A Non-Outsourceable Puzzle to Prevent Hosted Mining
by
TPTB_need_war
on 12/09/2015, 13:25:13 UTC
I guess the counter argument to (2) is that a lot of people initially believe its possible for miners (e.g. mining in a pool) to steal work, and it takes some effort to convince them that they can't.

Except they can. It is called a Share Withholding Attack which I learned from reading Meni Rosenfeld's 2011 white paper, where the miner withholds the shares which are winning blocks, thus stealing the work of the other honest miners in the pool. And his proposed solution oblivious shares was apparently never adopted by Bitcoin.

Given the high variance afaik this sort of cheating can't be detected statistically very well.

The motivation for doing this could be for the purposes of monopolizing pooling to drive up transaction fees, when debasement ends, because transactions fees are a Tragedy of the Commons.