Topic: Incorporating the p2pool concept into Bitcoin (Read 17470 times)

Yes, it does need to be limited. Every output, even in the coinbase transaction, takes up bytes, and the blocksize has a very hard limit.

You're seriously oversimplifying this scenario.  The dynamics of such an attack are economically and socially complex, but if you think deeply about it, I think you'll find that defences can be mounted that would eventually bankrupt the attackers.  Though it would be messy while it played out.

You also don't seem to be considering the implications that this attack would have on confidence in the system, if successful.  It's essentially an existential threat, and giving in simply isn't an option.

It would be almost trivial to implement— just bundle it, if nothing else. But I suspect the ship has already sailed for this.

We now have miners with hundreds of thousands of dollars of equipment which run it off a raspberry pi. Who send their coins directly to coinbase to be sold. Who have never used a Bitcoin client of any kind (except for the coinbase webwallet), certainly not a full node, and they have no concept of why they'd want to.  The name they trust most in mining is operator of their chosen pool— who could be robbing them blind, but maybe isn't— who has a financial interest to the tune of— say— >$700,000/month in keeping miners on their pool, and who tells them they don't need to worry about things, and who is believed because far too many people— including you— overly fixate on "51%" and ignore the fact that someone who controls 25% hashpower can reorg 6 confirms with 5% success or 2 with 31% success.

Never mind that the question of parties with large hashpower using it to harm other Bitcoin users is not hypothetical, as its recently been done— achieved huge profits in the process— and seems to have resulted in no negative consequences for the involved pool, just a lot of victim blaming, and some months delayed promises that the responsible parties have been sacked.

Perhaps many miners could be moved to running something p2pool like if doing so was easy, but just running a Bitcoin node is no longer so easy that it can be treated as costless, with now gigabytes of space wasted by pointless dust-scale messaging transactions. Transactions that the Bitcoin users didn't care about because they weren't running nodes and because many people had a monetary interest in being able to wastefully use the systems resources in that manner.

In any case, I don't think the problems you're facing are technical. The problem is that participants in the system don't know or care. I think the problem is also that to some extent people who should know better are not paying attention to the mining ecosystem and don't realize what a mess things are, and some who do are tempering their statements because saying "Hey everyone, the Bitcoin security assumptions are basically invalid in the current environment" too loudly may be adverse to the value of their holdings.

If you can figure how to educate people on the subject in a world where people have multimillion dollar a year income streams that depend on hashers not being educated and while other people own hundreds of millions of dollars of Bitcoin whos value might be eroded if the concerns become too wide spread— then I think progress could be made. Otherwise?  ::shrugs::

[I don't even intend to suggest intentional misconduct due to the monetary interest, only: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it."]

The daily limit of 660,000 transactions isn't an issue.  Payouts would only be done using one transaction per block, the coinbase transaction, which does not necessarily need to be limited to an arbitrary number of outputs.

You're right, it is up to every full node to validate the blockchain, but to implement a change in the blockchain, you don't need the majority of users, or miners.  You only need the majority of mining operators.  Once they adopt a change, they can prevent everyone else from using Bitcoin until they comply with that change.

If the majority of mining operators (a very, very small minority of people) said "In order to spend Bitcoin, you must pay a 10% transaction fee (tax)."  People would bitch and complain, but rather than letting go of their Bitcoin, they will comply with the new rules.  If they decided to set Bitcoin on an inflationary tract, who's going to tell them differently?  Uncle Joe, who's entire net worth is measured in Bitcoin?  I don't think so.  90% are Uncle Joe, 10% will be cheering because their account balances will skyrocket!

Don't underestimate the general apathy of the people, it's a powerful weapon in the right hands.

Do you realize there's only 600,000 available transactions per day total? If everyone who downloaded bitcoin.exe was getting daily payouts, there'd be no room for actual peer to peer transactions. Everyone who uses bitcoin cannot be a miner.

Every full node checks the validity of the coinbase transaction.  SPV nodes currently don't, but they could if we switch to using Merkle sum trees.

The power that miners have over the network is strictly limited to choosing the transaction ordering.  Their attacks are limited to denial of service (mining empty blocks), double spending (chain reorgs), and censorship (selective rejection of transactions for political reasons).

But even this rests on the assumption that the folks running non-mining, verifying nodes are economically significant enough as a whole to resist miner fraud.

To coin Money, regulate the Value thereof, and of foreign Coin, and fix the Standard of Weights and Measures;

To provide for the Punishment of counterfeiting the Securities and current Coin of the United States;

This is where Bitcoin is headed if we only have a small handful of pool operators controlling the global hash power.  What if those few decided to get together and issue a code update that allows them to generate all the BTC they wanted.

it´s sad but now when p2pool should grow (because of massive danger that big mining pools take control over BTC network) it just gets smaller and smaller.

i expect/hope shortly to get my 17TH/s shipped (CT & BM) and brought already good server to build up my own public node. Now i am just testing and optimizing it with my current miner/s, but now i´m not sure anymore that it will pay itself back even if payouts are better than in centralized pools. last 2 weeks average payout is 20% less than with my other miners make in centralized pools.

most important is to find a way, how to bring miners back to p2pool. it is important that we get/set up more stabile nodes.

other important thing would be to find funds for dev-team (and also marketing-team) to make p2pool stronger and more known. if every nod would set up a small fee and spend it to dev-team (so i will do), we would be already a small step further.

Sorry about my bad englisch (not native speaker   )

Isn't the answer, the main Bitcoin Exchanges - BTC-E, Bitstamp, MTGox etc. & Bitpay?
A) Isn't the danger posed by centralisation of mining the biggest threat to their business model and income stream?
B) Couldn't addressing the problem even improve their current income stream?
C) Wouldn't it be the most positive marketing investment they could make?

If there was a transparent P2Pool fund set up and administered by the Bitcoin Foundation that would be used to encourage a switch over in hashrate distribution to P2Pool till until none of the other pools controlled more than 10% of the hashing power, would you?

1) Be willing to contribute 5% of your trading fees during a trial period to see if we could make demonstrable headway to achieving that goal.
2) If not 5% what would be the maximum % you could consider contributing ?
3) If you were unable to contribute would you consider giving users the ability to opt-in to a higher trading fee on an individual basis.

Thoughts?

If you want to work on fixing this, IMHO the right place to start is by improving the bitcoin.org website. Create a section for miners and put best practices and advice there, make videos showing how to configure p2pool, heck, as p2pool screwed up their own website why not give it a section of bitcoin.org and work with Forrest to make that the official website? There are no other competing decentralised pools after all.

This would mean having literally a million payouts in the coinbase txn..

I envision p2pool being hierarchical for it to succeed: sharechain > sub-pools > nodes > miners
randomly connecting to nodes/sub-pools solves the high variance problem of bitcoin. Miners are no longer incentivized to join a pool/node with the most hashrate, since they should be automatically balanced.
However, doing so raises the trust issue that TierNolan described and to which he proposes an incremental trust level solution.
I believe this is the way to go for p2pool to go mainstream. People just access the network, start mining, no cares given unless they want to.

I don't think you understood what I was talking about wrt hardware changes. I wasn't suggesting a change to the controllers at all.