Re: [ANN] SpreadCoin | Decentralize Everything (official thread)
And in general, how goes the fight for true decentralization?
Not too shabby. The potential of Mr Spreads anti-pool innovation has been noted, borrowed, adopted, adapted and is now obliquely traceable via reference #34 to Ziftrcoin (*) in Andrew Miller et als' preprint paper (PDF) Nonoutsourceable Scratch-Off Puzzles to Discourage Bitcoin Mining Coalitions.
So there ya go.
Cheers
Graham
(*) Spreadcoin repos was created well before Ziftrcoin.
Actually there is a Suprnova Pool for Spreadcoin as well as Ziftrcoin
I prefer to call it "Pool Discouragement" rather than "anti-pool".
Yeah, I'm still trying to get my head around how the pool actually operates in this instance. For instance, does this pool operate using the same mechanisms detailed in the whitepaper?
If it did, anybody could steal the pools coins. I think OCminer has found a clever workaround though although I haven't seen the source code yet. There are a few ways to beat SpreadX11 as far as I know but none are widely used yet.
Its basically all around encryption.
With the original implementation you'd really have to expose the private_key to the client/miner and also transmit it publicly over the (inter-)net - which is a major security issue.
What I did is I simply added (salted) https encryption to the whole datastream between pool and miner which makes it impossible to intercept.
(snipped for space)
Well damn. I brought up this countermeasure with someone and they suggested it might still be surmountable, but I forget how. I hope my questions didn't spark the slag storm that started - it was not my intention. As I mentioned there's few efforts in cryptocurrency to prevent pooling, or otherwise provide a means to protect a currency network against the flaws in a pool dominated network. Its interesting that some of the primary technological hurdles in cryptocurrency are the fundamental aspects of the digital world. For instance, the bitcoin protocol solved the problem that anything digital can be copied. Now we're hunting for another protocol wherein a piece of data can't be distributed and worked on by a group of people.