Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

It's not about need. If it is profitable to mine, professional miners will exist. You can't create an incentive structure and then call it a "bug" when somebody optimizes for it.



So you can create a disincentive for non-user mining.

What would be the downside?

This is supposed to be a distributed system.


What kind of discouragement do you have in mind?


One could limit share of hash power. Perhaps by IP address. Or through blockchain links to previously-solved blocks.

The Tor Network, for example, has mechanisms for excluding bad participants. There's the bad exit flag, for relays that snoop traffic. Relays that harvest onion hostnames get banned. So do relays that attempt traffic analysis.

There's even a policy of discouraging new relays in commonly-used AS. There's no exclusion mechanism. But I don't see why there couldn't be, if there were too much concentration.

Edit: See https://trac.torproject.org/projects/tor/wiki/doc/ReportingB...




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: