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Miners Aren’t Friends

blog.keep.network

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Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#2
To my limited understanding of Ethereum and Bitcoin, the network already has rules in place to punish nodes that misbehave or cheat. In the case of Bitcoin, that is part of layer 1 so it is independent of any application layers and thus it should always be at the core of the network.

With PoS cheating is likely to become a bigger issue [1], since with PoW the miners who get punished will have wasted their time and electricity.

Would be great to hear comments from more knowledgable people.

[1] https://twitter.com/hugohanoi/status/951762596255838209

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#5
Almost all miners use a mining pool so wouldn't have access to these tricks. The pools on the other hand...

I used to have an Ethereum mining operation, before it became unprofitable to do so. It was one of the most fun ventures of my life. All the cards and enormous heat and fans exchanging outside air in. It felt like I was part of something futuristic and new, solving problems I had never had experience with before. I miss it very much, I wish it could have gone on forever.

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#6
post #2

To my limited understanding of Ethereum and Bitcoin, the network already has rules in place to punish nodes that misbehave or cheat. In the case of Bitcoin, that is part of layer 1 so it is independent of any application layers and thus it should always be at the core of the network. With PoS cheating is likely to become a bigger issue [1], since with PoW the miners who get punished will have wasted their time and el…

[deleted]

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#7
Some of these issues do seem concerning, but most wouldn't be profitable unless every miner was doing it (because the impact on one of these malicious behaviors will be felt in a later block).

Unless you're lucky enough to mine two blocks in a row, I don't see how you can gain directly from malicious transaction reordering. You'll consume the first retrieve fee, but the second retrieve will be in a later block (which you probably won't mine).

I'm not saying this is ok, but I'm also not sure this particular situation is worth the effort to exercise.

Transaction insertion, however, sounds like it would be very effective for the case presented. On the other hand, how big a deal are "guessing game" dapps?

You can sum all this up by saying, "consolidation of mining power can be used to exploit the network at the cost of non-miners". But consolidation is a problem for reasons beyond just these examples.

Finally, if a network becomes so corrupt, people will move to a different cryptocurrency (which will lower the value of the corrupt network). Thus, the bad actors would be taking small short term gains at their own cost of long term survival (especially when considering sunk costs in hardware).

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#8

Almost all miners use a mining pool so wouldn't have access to these tricks. The pools on the other hand... I used to have an Ethereum mining operation, before it became unprofitable to do so. It was one of the most fun ventures of my life. All the cards and enormous heat and fans exchanging outside air in. It felt like I was part of something futuristic and new, solving problems I had never had experience with befor…

Care to share some insights into the economics of running it and how it became unprofitable?

Re: Miners Aren’t Friends

#9

Almost all miners use a mining pool so wouldn't have access to these tricks. The pools on the other hand... I used to have an Ethereum mining operation, before it became unprofitable to do so. It was one of the most fun ventures of my life. All the cards and enormous heat and fans exchanging outside air in. It felt like I was part of something futuristic and new, solving problems I had never had experience with befor…

If you have modern cards you can still mine with one of the services that find the most profitable algorithm for you.

I use NiceHash and have historically made about $2/day per GTX1070. This past month though I've been making more that double that.

EDIT: Use this site to find out if your cards will be profitable considering your energy costs: https://www.nicehash.com/profitability-calculator

I do want to leave one important caveat. NiceHash was recently hacked and anyone who left their money in their online NiceHash wallest lost it. They recently came back online and claimed they have a plan for paying people back and will give more details at the end of this month. That being said they have paid me for my mining since the hack. If you do use them I'd recommend withdrawing to wallets you control as often as possible.

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