Proof of Work: Improving upon Bitcoin's mining pools can go a long way for decentralization

Benjamin Friedrich | The Block

Quick Take

  • Blockholding attacks have been long discussed where someone (often from a competing pool) joins a mining pool that pays out based on the average hashrate of the pool but withholds valid blocks, so the pool misses out on earnings and potentially becomes unprofitable
  • F2pool a mining pool, recently mentioned that this sort of attack is actually happening quite often
  • Increasing decentralization at the mining pool level, like implementing Matt Corralo’s BetterHash can go a long way for Bitcoin 
The following newsletter is republished with permission from Eric Meltzer of Primitive Ventures, a global venture investment firm with a focus on blockchain and related technologies. You can follow Eric on Twitter at @wheatpond and subscribe here to Proof of Work.