[bitcoin-dev] BIP proposal: Inhibiting a covert attack on the Bitcoin POW function

On Wed, Apr 05, 2017 at 09:37:45PM +0000, Gregory Maxwell via bitcoin-dev wrote: > On that basis, I offer the following BIP draft for discussion. > This proposal does not prevent the attack in general, but only > inhibits covert forms of it which are incompatible with > improvements to the Bitcoin protocol. > > I hope that even those of us who would strongly prefer that > ASICBOOST be blocked completely can come together to support > a protective measure that separates concerns by inhibiting > the covert use of it that potentially blocks protocol improvements. While I'm in favour of blocking covert usage of ASICBOOST, there's every reason to block non-covert usage of it as well. In a low margin business like mining, the advatange it gives is enormous - quite possibly 10x your profit margin - and given that barrier free access to being able to purchase ASICs is already an archilles heal for Bitcoin there is every reason to eliminate this legal vulnerability. Additionally, it's a technical vulnerability as well: we want getting into the ASIC manufacturing and design business to have as low barriers to entry as is feasible, and the ASICBOOST exploit significantly increases the minimum capital requirements to do so. Remember that the whole purpose of PoW is to destroy value on a level playing field. Anything that inhibits a level playing field is an exploit. While this isn't standard crypto - we can't fix every exploit completely - since we're going to do a technical change to partially mitigate the ASCIBOOST exploit there is every reason to fully mitigate it. -- https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 455 bytes Desc: Digital signature URL: <http://lists.linuxfoundation.org/pipermail/bitcoin-dev/attachments/20170405/90b81cc9/attachment-0001.sig>