Decrypt Media Spy Mining Report shows the Ethereum pools that exploit empty data mining blocks

Swimming pools that exploit empty mining blocks

Etherdig, a mining pool of Ethereum, has developed a new way to make profits – by collecting mining fees without processing transactions. The concept, called "mining espionage"It is becoming a growing trend in the industry.

As a preliminary matter, it is important to understand that blockchain in a blockchain does not contain the same amount of information. For example, Bitcoin blocks have a data limit of one megabyte and the Bitcoin Cash blocks are limited to 32 megabytes. The blocks should not contain much data to be verified and added to the chain.

The verification occurs when someone closes a block processing the hash, which is a code of all the data in the block. The code is therefore necessary to form the next block. Mineral pools transmitted to every new hash to all miners who are registered and will start working on it.

It is impossible to create a hash without displaying the block data. However, you can use a hash created to develop a new block before executing a transaction. If there are no transactions, there are no invalid transactions to cancel the block.

Miners receive hashes by registering in a mining pool. In doing so, they receive the hash and mine for themselves. As a result, you have mining espionage.

Mining spying it is related to selfish extraction, where it is when a miner finds a new block and tries to find a successor without informing the network. This gives the miner an advantage. The downside is that if someone else competes to work on the block and is accepted first, the selfish miner has just wasted time. To mitigate risk, selfish miners must make sure they have sufficient resources.

This reasoning deepens why people are worried about a 51% attack: if a pool of mines controls most of a computer's network power, it could monopolize the blockchain extraction by exploiting selfishness. .

Second Decrypt Media, Etherdig produced 1,250 blocks in the last three months and has not processed transactions. The platform blocking contains only the phrase "Interim Global Authority" and has compromised 3,750 ETHs in mining prizes over that period of time. As for Ethereum, the blockchain processes only 5,800 blocks a day, reaching 540,000.

Even other pools are behaving this way. For example, Coinfi, a cryptocurrency market research firm, has determined that F2Pool, which is the third largest mining area of ​​Ethereum that has 12.5% ​​of the network's hashrate, has extracted 100 empty blocks in 24 hours starting from 2 October 2018.

Technically, the blocks extracted in this way are not invalid and some argue that it is a legitimate way to maximize the activity. Others, on the other hand, believe that the empty blocks are harmful to the network because they make the extraction harder. This eventually increases the risk of monopolistic mining pools. miners also waste time on invalid blocks, reducing network transaction capacity.