Selfish mine pool
Publish: 2021-04-27 23:06:26
1. This is the second part of a series of articles on "key elements of becoming a better blockchain". Although decentralization is not an end in itself, it is a means to many ends, including resistance to censorship, corruption and collusion. Inclusive institutions with multi participation; And a fair distribution of wealth, power and influence. Decentralization is not suitable for most applications because of its low efficiency and high cost. However, for those applications that need decentralization, the underlying platform is much more reliable than the oral decentralized services. Did we go to the center? I want to remind us that decentralization is multidimensional, far from binary. Another closely related topic is unlicensed authorization, which will also be discussed here: allowing anyone anywhere to contribute to a project, platform or community is one of the most important parts of the spirit of decentralization
are there multiple client applications? There are two schools of thought. One assumption is that a single normative client application can concentrate limited resources on one project, and a development team can communicate more easily, which will maximize the success rate and competitiveness compared with other platforms. In addition, a single client application can prevent consensus failure caused by local account book inconsistency of different nodes (at least as long as each node upgrades its software after hard forking). On the other hand, the existence of multiple clients will make the network more likely to survive attacks (one client may stop block proction completely) or consensus failure (one or more clients cannot run the protocol correctly, which may lead to wrong block or stop block proction completely). In fact, both happened in Ethereum. But there are more subtle reasons. Firstly, the parallel application of multiple clients reces the dominant influence of a single core development team on the network, which is one of the biggest problems of bitcoin governance (zcash foundation will also decide to build a second zcash client to balance the power of electric coin). Moreover, different clients may make different architecture decisions and have different advantages (for example, mining, data search), and using different languages to write clients can enable more developers to participate in core development. Although parallel applications and beta applications are very good, the mainstream is the main network client: for example, bitcoin has at least 15 client applications, but 97% of the nodes run a program, that is, bitcoin core
how many organizations control mining computing power? The more parties involved in mining, the more difficult it is to collude with each other to engage in selfish mining, or to engage in double flower attacks (commonly known as 51% attacks, but the actual mathematical principles are more complex). This is not a hypothetical risk, as it has occurred in networks such as Ethereum classic and bitcoin gold. In addition, more miners means a fairer distribution of mining rewards. Although many indivial miners may participate in mining, because of incentives, they will gather in a few mines, and even a seemingly decentralized network may rely on a few entities for Mining: the three largest Ethereum mines jointly control 60% of the total power, while bitcoin's top four mines account for about 56%.
are there multiple client applications? There are two schools of thought. One assumption is that a single normative client application can concentrate limited resources on one project, and a development team can communicate more easily, which will maximize the success rate and competitiveness compared with other platforms. In addition, a single client application can prevent consensus failure caused by local account book inconsistency of different nodes (at least as long as each node upgrades its software after hard forking). On the other hand, the existence of multiple clients will make the network more likely to survive attacks (one client may stop block proction completely) or consensus failure (one or more clients cannot run the protocol correctly, which may lead to wrong block or stop block proction completely). In fact, both happened in Ethereum. But there are more subtle reasons. Firstly, the parallel application of multiple clients reces the dominant influence of a single core development team on the network, which is one of the biggest problems of bitcoin governance (zcash foundation will also decide to build a second zcash client to balance the power of electric coin). Moreover, different clients may make different architecture decisions and have different advantages (for example, mining, data search), and using different languages to write clients can enable more developers to participate in core development. Although parallel applications and beta applications are very good, the mainstream is the main network client: for example, bitcoin has at least 15 client applications, but 97% of the nodes run a program, that is, bitcoin core
how many organizations control mining computing power? The more parties involved in mining, the more difficult it is to collude with each other to engage in selfish mining, or to engage in double flower attacks (commonly known as 51% attacks, but the actual mathematical principles are more complex). This is not a hypothetical risk, as it has occurred in networks such as Ethereum classic and bitcoin gold. In addition, more miners means a fairer distribution of mining rewards. Although many indivial miners may participate in mining, because of incentives, they will gather in a few mines, and even a seemingly decentralized network may rely on a few entities for Mining: the three largest Ethereum mines jointly control 60% of the total power, while bitcoin's top four mines account for about 56%.
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