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

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

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A quick note about an attack on Bitcoin that’s been observed in the wild recently. Block withholding attacks have been discussed for a long time—the term refers to two different things, confusingly, but what we’re discussing here is when 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.
Recently, F2pool mentioned on wechat that it was observable from hashrate distribution that this was actually happening a lot. Interestingly, there’s been a proposed fix for this from Luke Dashjr for a long time, but it would require a hard fork so it hasn’t been implemented yet. While it might not be a massively urgent problem, I would love to see increasing adoption of things at the pool level which make Bitcoin more decentralized (like Matt Corrallos BetterHash) and I plan to write a bit more about that in the next issue.
More next week!
Bitcoin & Friends
Jimmy on Bitcoin
Optech on Bitcoin [ed: sign up for their newsletter too! it’s great!]
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Bitcoin Core contributor meetings: many contributors met in person for a periodic CoreDev.techevent last week, with real-time transcripts provided by contributor Bryan Bishop:
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Presentation: The Next Softfork: Bitcoin Optech contributor Steve Lee gave a presentation during last month’s Optech Executive briefings about possible future Bitcoin soft forks. The video is now available
Tony from Kadena
Kadena is building Pact, a formally verifiable smart-contracting language for financial applications, and Chainweb, a PoW blockchain that uses multiple chains in parallel to increase throughput.
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The Kadena team is working on stability as we look forward to Chainweb Testnet v2 in a couple months.
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Pact 3.0 was released, the smart contract language with Formal Verification now supports modular governance, SPV and hybrid blockchains.
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Pact support for cross-chain multi-step transactions using SPV PR 246.
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Released JavaScript pact-lang-api to work with Pact 3.0 PR 530.
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Chainweb node startup performance improvements PR 241 and PR 243.
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Chainweb improvements to mempool sync logic PR 234.
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Ability to send a single transaction to Chainweb for submitting and resolving via an internal listen call PR 231.
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Kadena CEO Will Martino was a guest on a recent episode of the Crypto and Blockchain Talk podcast to chat about enterprise blockchain.
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Monica Quaintance explained Chainweb on NEAR Protocol's Whiteboard Series Episode 19.
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Monica Quaintance had a TV interview with Bloomberg Technology's Emily Chang to discuss the future of blockchain and cryptocurrency.
Aviv from Spacemesh
Spacemesh is a programmable cryptocurrency powered by a novel proof-of-space-time consensus protocol.
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Misc Spacemesh App UI improvements
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Spacemesh App new wallet addresses feature logic and UI
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Full node - Eligibility oracle but fixes and work on stabilizing and refining mining and p2p tests
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Community - Spacemesh Epicenter.tv episode aired https://epicenter.tv/episode/291/
JZ from Decred
Decred is an autonomous digital currency with a hybrid consensus system. It is built to be a self-ruling currency where everyone can vote on the rules and project-level decision making proportionately to their stake.
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The Decred bug bounty program is up for renewal, Degeri has submitted a new proposal and provided a recap of the last five months. Of the 58 submissions, 9 were eligible for a payout and a total of $3,729 of the $100,000 budgeted for the program was spent.
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Raedah Group; one of Decred's corporate contractors, has begun the process of implementing Decred support for Trezor Blockbook. This is the final piece of the puzzle needed to get Decred running on Trust Wallet as all the client side code has been completed by the Trust Wallet team.
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Three big events coming up for Decred. We'll be hosting our first get together in Beijing on June 20th, as well as being out in force and presenting at Campus Party in Brazil from June 19 to the 23rd. Community member Ana Dalia will also be speaking about Decred at the Blockchain Summit Latam in Mexico City on July 4-5.
Johnny from Stellar
Stellar is an open network for sending and exchanging value of any kind. Its global network enables digitization of assets - from carbon credits to currencies - and enables movement around the internet with ease.
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Horizon 0.18.0 has been released along with our new Ticker API 1.0.0.
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CAP-0021 has moved to FCP: Acceptance, along with CAP-0015 after this PR is merged in.
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The Core Team merged 8 PRs in the last week, and the Platform Team merged 59 PRs in over various repositories (including the Go monorepo, JS SDKs, Java SDKs, and others).
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The Platform Team found a major bug in the Go compiler.
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We're now hiring an integration engineer in addition to our existing roles on our jobs page.
Privacy coins
Paige & Zooko from Zcash
Zcash is a digital currency utilizing zk-SNARKs to enable its privacy-protecting properties.
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Product updates, including current priorities
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Zcon1 takes place next week in Split, Croatia
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Q2 livestream updates available on our YouTube channel
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Full details: https://forum.zcashcommunity.com/t/june-14-2019-weekly-update-community-comms/33778
Mitchell from Monero
Monero is a open-source, privacy-focused cryptocurrency using the ASIC-resistant CryptoNote PoW algorithm. It enforces all privacy features at the protocol level to ensure that all transactions create a single fungible anonymity pool.
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CLI v0.14.1.0 has been released, now with deterministic builds. GUI coming in the next week or so.
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Monero Konferenco begins this Saturday in Denver, CO with speakers from around the globe. You can still register (and there are some free tickets for volunteers).
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All open Community Crowdfunding System proposals (developers, researchers, and outreach) have been funded. Thank you to our anonymous benefactors!
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Analysis of Lelantus shared, including prototyping code for Monero-to-Lelantus output migration. Reviewing Omniring next.
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Compressed linkable spontaneously anonymous group (LSAG) signatures are integrated in a test branch.
Daniel from Grin
Grin is a community-driven implementation of the Mimblewimble protocol that aims to be privacy preserving, scalable, fair, and minimal.
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Merged PRs: 5 in /grin | 3 in /grin-wallet | 3 unique contributors
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An iteration of Grin's governance process was proposed. To be discussed in this week's governance meeting, it's arguably one of the most significant proposals thus far.
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With less than 30 days left for the scheduled hard fork, v2.0.0 milestones for node and walletare almost complete. Beta binaries are due to be released and we are on track to run a private testnet this week.
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@yeastplume has been focusing on testing and prep work ahead of the hard fork.
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New bulletproof rewind scheme by @jaspervdm merged.
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Paper: Revelio, a new privacy-preserving proof of reserves protocol for Grin exchanges.
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Merged PRs: 3 in /grin | 2 in /grin-wallet | 4 unique contributors
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Grin v1.1.0 has been released, see detailed upgrade information here.
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We have published tentative timelines and info on the v2.0.0 hard-fork that is happening in mid-July. Affected parties take note and plan accordingly.
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The last governance meeting covered the hard fork schedule, Grin budget, a Governance working group, and a contact group for Pools & Exchanges.
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Following the 1.1.0 release, @yeastplume is moving forward with 2.0.0 work.
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@antiochp took a pass at improving the Dandelion++ implementation, and also expanded on ideas for a simplified timer design.
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MMR Storage Optimization proposal by @antiochp.
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Vite announced an update to their wallet.
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More Grin info here.
Beni from Beam
Beam is a confidential and scalable cryptocurrency based on Mimblewimble.
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We are happy to offer our European friends the capacity to purchase Beam using Euros, thanks to our integration on Elastum
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We have launched a unique Web Series on Youtube, #FocusOnPrivacy where you will discover what Crypto players feel and think about privacy
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Swaps: Fixed rollback/rescan, added addition test for TX without “change”, changed Beam Lock time for testing
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Wrong error in our bridge when LTC user doesn't have enough money to swap #717
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Add a command to get full transaction details #613
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Add the transaction type to transaction history #614
Arnaud from AZTEC Protocol
AZTEC Protocol is an efficient zero-knowledge protocol built on top of Ethereum, making plug-and-play value transmission and asset governance privacy tools for developers and companies.
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This week, we are starting work on adding note management to our client side software, to abstract away our UTXO based model from dapp developers.
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We are also starting work on upgradeable note registries to make it easier to add support for new public token types, and mixer contracts.
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We’re welcoming Charlie Cowan to the team as a summer intern.