Not sure if this is a duplicate post, but....
"Significant expansion of the scratchpad would require an increase in iterations, which in turn implies an overall time increase. "Heavy" calls in a trustless p2p network may lead to serious vulnerabilities, because nodes are obliged to check every new block's proof-of-work. If a node spends a considerable amount of time on each hash evaluation, it can be easily DDoSed by a flood of fake objects with arbitrary work data (nonce values). "
-https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/CryptoNight
Anybody care to elaborate? Is this a realistic current/future concern? Isn't the most flattering description of CryptoNight.
Pretty sure this refers to just spamming a
blockchainnetwork with low difficulty blocks.
As the node does not know immediately if a block is fake/valid or not, it must spend processing time on verifying against the current blockchain.
The idea is that there must be a balance between the rate at which a node can receive new hashes to check being outpaced by its capacity to verify hashes.
If the new hashes sent to the node outpace the capacity to verify it, it will be stuck in a verification loop, and effectively no longer functions as a node through which the network is based on.
The limitation of a 2Mb scratchpad for cryptonight was the maximum size they felt was necessary in order to "outpace" the rate at which blocks come into a node, (while maintaining a memory-hard proof of work function.)
Someone correct me if im wrong?
