Topic: Sabotaging Mining Pools - page 2. (Read 5459 times)

um actually. cgminer shows you blocks you find so you can tell.

this is called a witholding attack, you would need to be a large part of the pool. only way to do it without costing yourself lots is on a PPS pool.

It doesn't work this way.

If it did work that way, you could just keep the block for yourself.

You can't tell which share solves a block for the pool.

Edit:

Or it does, and I'm really tired, sorry

If someone was to make a few line change to cgminer or other mining software that just meant that if you found a share that was a BLOCK it discarded it instead of sending to the mining pool this would soon kill the pool for virtually zero cost to the sabotager.

Only cost to the sabotager (assuming they were mining anyway) would be that one in 1.8 millions shares would not be submitted so reducing their personal income by a tiny amount. (Plus the 5% cost of mining PPS).

But the cost to the mining pool would be massive as they would be paying out on shares to someone who could NEVER find a block.

E.g. to sabotage slush who are charging 2-5% you would only need to have 2-5% of the pools hashing power (so about 25-60 g/hash) to wipe out their entire profits and so soon them. You would just mine PPS and only submit non-block shares!.

And if you were a Pool yourself you could possible redirect some of your users to solve other pools share hashes, collect the fees from the other pool but never send them successful blocks. In this way you can kill the competition without having any hashing power and only relatively small costs.

I know that p2pool tries to work round this by adding a 0.25BTC bonus if you submit a block making share but this hardly changes the costs significantly.

Obviously the pools could drop PPS, but then the costs would just look like bad luck to their users!