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Last active February 23, 2016 04:19
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SF Bitcoint Dev meetup / Bitcoin's P2P Network - the soft underbelly of bitcoin
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BitcoinNotes_2016_02_22.md

BitCoin's p2p Network - the soft underbelly of the p2p network

http://www.meetup.com/SF-Bitcoin-Devs/events/228880909/

Patrick Strateman, Blockstream Core Tech Engineer, will talk about the state of Bitcoin's P2P network. https://github.com/pstratem

Pool Switching Latency

https://poolbench.antminer.link

Slide showing differences in Pool switching latency

  • btcchina (largest) / antpool
  • Observed block switching latency p2p -- all blocks (slide)

Why does this matter?

the higher your block switching latency is the higher block switching latency causes an increase in stale/orphaned blocks

As their latency to switch goes up, they cost everyone more money.

Validationless Mining - pool builds block based on other pool's stratum announcement. No validation - not even headers validation

who's doing it? Antpool, f2Pool (discus Pool), BTCC (BTC China) - 62.5% of hashing power operating as one pool - costs everyone at least 1/2 % of revenue which is definitely a problem!

Questions__

  • Is this intentional? Nobody knows. It could also be accidental
  • What's the incentive to verify? There's no incentive to do this
  • Bad things - shenanigans - pools could detect you and send you garbage
  • History - why does this validationless mining problem exist? problems with orphans - money issues? Orphan block
  • Do you have a solution? No... the only solution is that the fees be higher than the blocks. No single fundamental way to fix this issue
  • I think this is unintentional so if someone tried to do this intentionally it could be (much worse) than the 1.5% - as far as I can tell nobody is intentionally attacking the network today - blocks are slow to relay
  • How do we save the system against abuse? [sentiment of the room is to avoid third party verification stamping] interesting discussion on potential solution / somewhat technical or sketched out

Terms

  • SPV Clients? - if we get rid of these can do _____ - "A Bitcoin implementation that does not verify everything, but instead relies on either connecting to a trusted node, or puts its faith in high difficulty as a proxy for proof of validity. BitCoinJ is an implementation of this mode." link

Conclusions

  • Might makes right - large sized pools seem to be able to "get away" with validationless mining

Photos

Validationless Mining

Histogram

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