21–30 of 256 posts
Also, how easy is it to detect that miners are doing these things? If it's not terribly difficult, then maybe a federated system would iron out some of the wrinkles?
Miners are surely not gamers’ friends. All high end cards have been sold out for weeks. They are now completely overpriced ($1300 for a GTX 1080 Ti).
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…
It might not be worth the effort when volume is low, but if you have a highly-used set of contracts susceptible to this, there will be a stronger incentive to take advantage of them. With high volume, if you do it only occasionally, you can gain an edge without necessarily revealing network corruption (unless someone is looking for it). Additionally, this kind of careful misbehavior can lead to consolidation---by allowing some clever miners to gain enough of an advantage to continually grow their operation.
Note also that only the most basic transaction reordering gains solely from transaction fees. Transaction insertion requires no further blocks, and forced errors can be used to subsidize miner transactions (rather than simply to gain later on). Lastly, censorship has more than economic advantages, depending on the underlying application.
If the whole network becomes corrupt, people will move; however, there's a lot of room between "enough malicious transactions to cause a problem" and "network is so corrupt people are leaving", particularly if a chain is popular. Indeed, if a chain is popular, "just leaving" is not necessarily an immediate option. The important thing is that, as a developer for a given chain, you want to make sure you're aware of these pitfalls (whichever ones apply to your chain---many will apply across many chains) so you can design around them. More than many platforms, building for public chains require adversarial thinking. Or perhaps better put, they should require adversarial thinking. It's easy to forget that when you're getting started.
This is even more true when you're building components that you intend others to build on, which is what we're doing. That's what motivates the interest we have on our team in these kinds of concerns. We feel they're important to share as development on public blockchains gains greater visibility, interest, and therefore new developers.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 im…
I don't understand the economic argument for personal mining (I totally get it from a fun, geeky PoV if making money isn't the primary goal - it's how I got started in crypto). A GTX1070 costs about $800. At $4/day, it will take you 200 days to make back your principle (ignoring power costs, difficulty scores going up etc. - in reality it will obviously take you even longer to cover your costs). If you had put that s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 im…
I don't understand the economic argument for personal mining (I totally get it from a fun, geeky PoV if making money isn't the primary goal - it's how I got started in crypto). A GTX1070 costs about $800. At $4/day, it will take you 200 days to make back your principle (ignoring power costs, difficulty scores going up etc. - in reality it will obviously take you even longer to cover your costs). If you had put that s…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 im…
I don't understand the economic argument for personal mining (I totally get it from a fun, geeky PoV if making money isn't the primary goal - it's how I got started in crypto). A GTX1070 costs about $800. At $4/day, it will take you 200 days to make back your principle (ignoring power costs, difficulty scores going up etc. - in reality it will obviously take you even longer to cover your costs). If you had put that s…
A couple years ago I dabbled in mining. I got a top end card that would mine transactions for 16+ hours a day. When I actually wanted to use my computer, I'd flip mining off for a couple of hours and do whatever I needed.
I got to game with ultra graphics, have a PC for school work, and do some mining.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't understand the economic argument for personal mining (I totally get it from a fun, geeky PoV if making money isn't the primary goal - it's how I got started in crypto). A GTX1070 costs about $800. At $4/day, it will take you 200 days to make back your principle (ignoring power costs, difficulty scores going up etc. - in reality it will obviously take you even longer to cover your costs). If you had put that s…
Its simple: The risk taken is completely different! Mining is a much lower risk that yields less benefits.
If anything, at this point (especially with more and more new coins adopting PoS rather than PoW) I'd say it's more risky than just buying a stable coin (ETH, BTC, LTC etc) and sitting on it for a year (and that's before factoring in the risk of lost potential earnings had you simply bought rather than mined or that your mining pool gets hacked).
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…