<p dir="ltr"><br>
Den 11 feb 2015 09:55 skrev "Hector Chu" <<a href="mailto:hectorchu@gmail.com">hectorchu@gmail.com</a>>:<br>
><br>
> A proposal for stemming the tide of mining centralisation -- Requiring a<br>
> miner's signature in the block header (the whole of which is hashed), and<br>
> paying out coinbase to the miner's public key.<br>
><br>
> Please comment on whether this idea is feasible, has been thought of before,<br>
> etc., etc. Thank you.<br>
><br>
> Motivation<br>
> ----------<br>
><br>
> Mining is centralising to a handful of pool operators. This is bad for a<br>
> number of political reasons, which we won't go into right now. But I have<br>
> always believed that some years down the line, they could hold the users<br>
> hostage and change the rules to suit themselves. For instance by eliminating<br>
> the halving of the block reward.</p>
<p dir="ltr">[...] </p>
<p dir="ltr">> I propose that we require each miner to sign the block header prior to<br>
> hashing. The signature will be included in the data that is hashed. Further,<br>
> the coinbase for the block must only pay out to the public key counterpart of<br>
> the private key used to sign the block header.</p>
<p dir="ltr">[...]</p>
<p dir="ltr">> This will make it difficult to form a cooperating pool of miners who may not<br>
> trust each other, as the block rewards will be controlled by disparate parties<br>
> and not by the pool operator. Only a tight clique of trusted miners would be<br>
> able to form their own private pool in such an environment.</p>
<p dir="ltr">People already trust things like cloud mining, so your solution with increasing technical trust requirements won't help. But you will however break P2Pool instead. </p>
<p dir="ltr">Also, note that threshold signatures (group signatures) could probably be used by an actual distrusting pool's miners. There are already a proof of concept for this implemented with secp256k1 that works with Bitcoin clients silently. This wouldn't prevent such a pool from working. </p>