In a new analysis of Bitcoin mining, Ittay Eyal shows that the equilibrium between miners is unstable, and identifies a stable equilibrium that might, as a side effect, reduce the size of open, public mining pools.
We outline a small change to the Bitcoin mining protocol that rules out big, public mining pools. It preserves the current investment in Bitcoin by both existing users and by existing miners. It presents a fix to GHash's recent 51% excursion.
There seems to be a lot of confusion over the kinds of attacks that a Bitcoin mining monopoly can engage in. We clarify the space of attacks available to a Bitcoin mining monopoly.
A Bitcoin mining pool, called GHash and operated by an anonymous entity called CEX.io, just reached 51% of total network mining power today. Bitcoin is no longer decentralized. This note describes what we should do about it.
Emin Gün Sirer
Hacker and professor at Cornell, with interests that span distributed
systems, OSes and networking. Current projects include HyperDex, OpenReplica
and the Nexus OS. more...