Primecoin mining chartered accountant
The nice thing about having crypto-puzzles that are so difficult is that it is not practical for an attacker to modify the ledger. Someone who wants to, say, buy something from a Bitcoin merchant, get the goods shipped, and then later change that block to erase the transfer of money to the merchant, faces a very difficult task: What makes this difficult is that the main bulk of the miners will be working hard on adding new blocks at the tail end of the ledger, so an attacker, with limited resources, cannot hope to find alternative solutions for all the past blocks and catch up to the rest of the miners.
Miners today organize themselves into groups known as pools. A pool will typically consist of a set of cooperating nodes that share their revenues whenever they find blocks. Mining pools are kind of like the shared tip jar at a restaurant: Since this occurs relatively infrequently from the point of view of any given miner, sharing the proceeds enables the miners to have more predictability in their lives. The honest Bitcoin protocol assumes that all miners engage in a benign strategy where they quickly and truthfully share every block they have discovered.
Until now, everyone assumed that this was the dominant strategy; no other strategy was known that could result in higher revenues for miners. Our work shows that there is an alternative strategy, called Selfish-Mine, that enables a mining pool to make additional money at the risk of hurting the system. In Selfish-Mining, miners keep their block discoveries private to their own pool, and judiciously reveal them to the rest of the honest miners so as to force the honest miners to waste their resources on blocks that are ultimately not part of the blockchain.
Here's how this works in practice. Selfish miners start out just like regular miners, working on finding a new block that goes at the end of the blockchain. On occasion, like every other miner, they will discover a block and get ahead of the rest of the honest miners. Whereas an honest miner would immediately publicize this new block and cause the rest of the honest miners to shift their effort to the newly established end of the chain, a selfish miner keeps this block private. From here, two things can happen.
The selfish miners may get lucky again, and increase their lead by finding another block. They will now be ahead of the honest crowd by two blocks. They keep their new discovery secret as well, and work on extending their lead. Eventually, the honest miners close the gap.
Just before the gap is closed, the selfish pool publishes its longer chain. The result is that all the honest miners' work is discarded, and the selfish miners enjoy the revenue from their previously secret chain. The analysis of revenues gets technical from here, and the only way to do it justice is to follow along the algorithm and state machine provided in our paper. But the outcome is that the selfish mining pool, on the whole, nullifies the work performed by the honest pool through their revelations.
The success of the attack, and the amount of excess revenue it yields, depends on the size of the selfish mining pool. It will not be successful if the pool is below a threshold size.
But this threshold is non-existent in the current implementation -- selfish mining is immediately profitable. Once a group of selfish miners appear on the horizon, rational miners will preferentially join that mining group to obtain a share of their higher revenues.
And their revenues will increase with increasing group size. This creates a dynamic where the attackers can quickly acquire majority mining power, at which point the decentralized nature of the Bitcoin currency collapses, as the attackers get to control all transactions. It all depends on how the controlling group runs the currency.
But the decentralization, which in our view is so critical to Bitcoin's adoption, is lost. It would not be at all healthy for the Bitcoin ecosystem. It affects every currency system that is inspired by Bitcoin's blockchain. That includes Litecoin, PPcoin, Novacoin, Namecoin, Primecoin, Terracoin, Worldcoin, and a host of other currencies that share the same global ledger concept. We're the first to discover that the Bitcoin protocol is not incentive-compatible.
The protocol can be gamed by people with selfish interests. And once the system veers away from the happy mode where everyone is honest, there is no force that opposes the growth of really large pools that command control of the currency.
We cannot know for sure, but we suspect not. Ours is the first work to publicly investigate an alternative mining strategy. At the moment, the threshold is non-existent. A selfish mining pool can hide behind throwaway addresses to mask its identity. And while the timing of block revelations does look different for selfish miners, it's difficult to tell who was genuinely first, as near-concurrent revelations will arrive in different orders at hosts.
The only way to protect the system against selfish mining attacks is to get everyone to change their implementations. So the only way we can protect the system is by publicizing the potential attack. We have chosen not to launch the attack ourselves, because we care about the long-term viability of the currency.
We have shown that as long as selfish miners are below a certain threshold, they will not succeed. And while this threshold does not exist yet i. Followup post on frequently-asked questions. Parallel primecoin mining Is it possible to run primecoind as a server and connect other primecoin miners to it, so that they all mine for the same wallet on the server in parallel?
A kind of solo mining in parallel. Is mining bad for the CPU? I've started to mine some Primecoin on a couple of spare VPS's, and it's turning out to be profitable. I'm also mining a bit on my laptop when I'm not using it e. Alfred Xing 1 5. Please help me understand primecoin mining performance I've just started mining primecoin over my hp proliant dl g5 server with e So I'm using ypool. Is Primecoin mining competitive? Meaning, if more people mine Primecoin, does it get harder to mine?
From what I understand, it shouldn't, but I want to be sure. Shamoon 1, 3 25 Mining Primecoin with one server and no pool? Is it possible to mine with just one server for learning about mining, not for making a living! How to build Primecoin from source code on a mac? How should one build the client for the new cryptocoin Primecoin from source code on a mac?