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I find this article very misleading. >2. If ASICBOOST was actually used, we'd see ample evidence on the blockchain. The covert form of ASICBOOST (where they d
by AgentME 10y ago
I find this article very misleading.
>2. If ASICBOOST was actually used, we'd see ample evidence on the blockchain.
The covert form of ASICBOOST (where they don't use the version field, the form that was only recently publicly discovered) would only show up as a higher than usual number of empty blocks or blocks with reordered or missing transactions (depending on how the attacker implemented it; it's not necessarily both).
>3. ... As you can also examine for yourself, the transactions are ordered essentially by fee-per-byte, which is not what we would see if they were shuffled to create collisions.
I find it extremely disingenuous that the author only focuses on looking for reordered transactions and ignores the often-noticed unusual number of empty blocks that Antpool mines[0], and the article reaches absurdity when the author claims that the lack of reordered transactions means there's absolutely nothing to worry about.
>4. Building more efficient mining chips is what miners are supposed to do, as it secures the blockchain. Framing an optimization as an attack is disingenuous. Going from 28nm to 16nm was not an attack on the network. Better mining algorithms have never been considered an attack.
If for example a mining "optimization" encouraged every miner to mine only empty blocks, then calling it an attack doesn't sound out of place. An optimization that only often encourages miners to make empty blocks isn't categorically different.
>7. Segwit is being offered as a solution to ASICBOOST. Yet Segwit has at best a tenuous connection as a response to ASICBOOST mining. There are countless other, non-controversial solutions that can disable ASICBOOST, should one choose (wrongly) to do so.
Greg Maxwell's very post announcing the issue introduces a fix for the covert form of ASICBOOST that does not involve implementing SegWit!
[0] https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/50184/why-does-antpool-mine-so-many-empty-blocks https://bitcoin.stackexchange.com/questions/50184/why-does-a... http://www.livebitcoinnews.com/antpool-generating-large-amount-empty-bitcoin-blocks/ http://www.livebitcoinnews.com/antpool-generating-large-amou...
- kylebenzle 10y agoEither I am crazy and don't understand bitcoin or some well funded group is spending a lot of money to support SegWit and push Core's agenda. The few sensible posts like yours are downvoted to hell and back while pro-SegWit rocket to the top. Every point you make is spot on and there is no sensible reply to any of them, just a bunch of garbage about no one supports BU and BU will never happen...
- AgentME 10y agoI'm not really sure you replied to the right post, or you might be mixing up some things. The hackingdistributed article I was criticizing was framing Greg Maxwell as making up the whole ASICBOOST attack as pro-SegWit propaganda. There seems to be a group that's extremely anti-SegWit that thinks that the ASICBOOST news is made up to push SegWit through, and the article is following that pattern. I wouldn't necessarily call my criticisms "pro-SegWit", but it's definitely not on the mentioned anti-SegWit "side" if someone were to group things by side. >or some well funded group is spending a lot of money to support SegWit and push Core's agenda. The operator of Antpool has been one of the people speaking out against SegWit, and it's just been revealed that he most likely has had a huge secret monetary incentive against SegWit and not for the good of the network.
- STRML 10y agoI have been a fan of Gun's and the HackingDistributed blog for a long time. It's one of the few sites I regularly read on my RSS feed, and he's one of the few people who really seems to "get" Bitcoin and on-chain scaling. That said, I am surprised at how much this article seems to miss the point, given his otherwise stellar work. Gun, like many in the field, would agree that one of the defining characteristics of Bitcoin is its decentralization. Why, then, push the narrative that the current state of mining centralization is okay? Furthermore, how could it possibly be fine with him that these groups use a patented process - exclusive patents go against everything Bitcoin stands for - to cement their domination over other miners? In my opinion, the fact that this was hidden invalidates much of the anti-SegWit rhetoric coming from the miners. We all can agree that the soft-fork is large and complex, but it is well-engineered, well-tested, and solves several hard problems while opening Bitcoin up to a variety of novel scaling situations. Now we learn that the opposition's absolute opposition was based on a hidden advantage, not any technical failing of SegWit itself. It is not possible to consider many of these criticisms honestly given this regressive, protectionist hidden motive.