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Dash PoW Security Proposal: P2Pool nodes

Would you support a proposal to fund P2Pool nodes?


  • Total voters
    13
  • Poll closed .

BolehVPN

Well-known member
Throwing this idea out there as I think this is important for the security of the Dash network. As Dash mining isn't very profitable, this is often not looked at much but I do think it's important that we really need to examine our miners and hashrate distribution.

This is Dash's current hashrate distribution:



RankPool/MinerLast 100Last 1000
1Coinmine.pl51 %52.1 %
2Such Pool28 %21.4 %
3Unknown13 %20.5 %
4Mining Pool Hub4 %2.4 %
5P2Pool3 %1.8 %
6ipoMiner1 %0.9 %
7xpool.ca0 %0.2 %
8P2Pool-DASH0 %0.7 %


This would be alarming in Bitcoin with one pool controlling more than 51% of the hashrate but no alarm bells are ringing for Dash for some reason. P2Pool in comparison only occupies a small tiny percentage.

If it gains supporters, I will make an official proposal on the budget funding.

Budget

25-50 Dash/month for 6 months (to see how it will go)

What this will fund:
  • 3-4 0% Fee P2Pool nodes that will be hosted in US/Europe/Asia to cover the different regions. 25 Dash
  • Possibly a minimal management fee to maintain the nodes. 25 Dash

Why this is important:

  • The security of the blockchain relies on miners still and therefore we need to decentralise the hashing power.
  • Reliable P2Pool nodes are hard to find and often disappear after a while as they are often not profitable to maintain. In my own effort in finding a reliable P2Pool it was a real pain to find. As long p2pool nodes remain unreliable not many people will switch to it and with such a low hashrate, many miners will not even consider using p2pool due to large variances in payout.
  • We need critical mass to make p2pool popular and hopefully we can be the first coin to properly implement decentralized pools.
  • P2Pool is highly latency dependent compared to regular pools and therefore close p2pool nodes to the respective regions are important.
 
I believe that, as long as DASH is a PoW cryptocurrency, the hashrate issue must have a solution.

I know that IX is a "fix", but it seems to me, if we are keeping the PoW, the PoW must function adequately, lest there will always be a (risky) imbalance on our network.

tldr... voted yes
 
Sounds good at first sight but I feel like it kind of ruins the whole original idea of economic incentive in mining itself - here is my analogy: instead of being a profitable and economically effective "company" it will become a subsidized "state organization" which is no good imo.
 
This is also kind of irrelevant with Evolution coming up. In Evolution, the hash is only used to group Masternode Quorums, which will be extremely random, and Masternode quorums will decide what goes into the blockchain. If the miners try to put anything else in the block, it will be rejected. All items have to have been locked by a quorum. So Miners will no longer have any control over the blockchain, but will still provide a random hash, and if mining becomes centralized, it will still be completely secure.

So there really is no point in putting energy into this, we just need to get to the point where Masternode Quorums are working ASAP :)
 
This would be alarming in Bitcoin with one pool controlling more than 51% of the hashrate but no alarm bells are ringing for Dash for some reason.

It's because InstantX provides perfect and complete security against any doublespend attempts. If coinmine.pl submits a transaction that tries to doublespend a locked input, the block is rejected by the network. No big deal...as long as you use InstantX =)

Also, what Tante said...it will be irrelevant soon enough anyway.
 
In Evolution, the hash is only used to group Masternode Quorums, which will be extremely random, and Masternode quorums will decide what goes into the blockchain. If the miners try to put anything else in the block, it will be rejected. All items have to have been locked by a quorum. So Miners will no longer have any control over the blockchain, but will still provide a random hash, and if mining becomes centralized, it will still be completely secure.
If mining becomes centralized, could miners choose not to include certain transactions in the blockchain?
 
I think the transaction costs will be standard (virtually free for normal users and under 1% for merchants) and in this way, I don't think there will be an advantage or better said, a reason to exclude any transactions. I suppose they could set their fee high, so that they produce empty blocks. If that's the case, it might be prudent to remove that feature. I think the end goal is to keep Dash always cheap to use, always with plenty of capacity. ???
 
Ah, you mean, what if he wants to pick and choose where the funds are coming from? Insert their values into the system? These are good questions. I don't know? But that's not going to be any different with any mining system, no?
 
How does a miner know it's from gambling? I thought transactions would be anonymous..
Say I had a service, DuffieldDice, in which people would send their coins to specific addresses and have a chance of winning some jackpot. The addresses need to be public so that people know the game is fair. Even though the users can't be identified after darksending the money to the service, the transactions themselves can be blocked by a malicious miner.
 
Say I had a service, DuffieldDice, in which people would send their coins to specific addresses and have a chance of winning some jackpot. The addresses need to be public so that people know the game is fair. Even though the users can't be identified after darksending the money to the service, the transactions themselves can be blocked by a malicious miner.

Thanks for the explanation. That's not a good situation to be in.
 
Ah, you mean, what if he wants to pick and choose where the funds are coming from? Insert their values into the system? These are good questions. I don't know? But that's not going to be any different with any mining system, no?
And that's why every coin strives for its mining system to be as decentralized as possible... So, I guess we still would face those kind of problems, unless the masternodes can reject a block for not containing every transaction it should.
 
The problem with that is that you have to account for lag. The miner who finds the block isn't going to have every transaction that got locked. So this is a good point that needs to be looked at. Everyone always thinks about double spends, or the rising cost and backlog of transactions, but your point I hadn't thought of before; banning certain people from transacting for ulterior motives.
 
...though presumably, a gambling site can publish the balance of an Evolution username without revealing the public keys
 
Sounds good at first sight but I feel like it kind of ruins the whole original idea of economic incentive in mining itself - here is my analogy: instead of being a profitable and economically effective "company" it will become a subsidized "state organization" which is no good imo.

Good point. Though in my plan it would only be subsidized for 6 months and then perhaps I'll introduce a 1% fee once enough miners are on it.
 
i like the idea, but keep in mind that proper pools need to be secured against DDOS attacks, and this isn't cheap.
True p2pool nodes can be sprouted quite easily though and doesn't have to hold a lot of miners in one node.
Vultr instances for instance already come with 10 gbps ddos protection inbuilt.
 
The problem with that is that you have to account for lag. The miner who finds the block isn't going to have every transaction that got locked. So this is a good point that needs to be looked at. Everyone always thinks about double spends, or the rising cost and backlog of transactions, but your point I hadn't thought of before; banning certain people from transacting for ulterior motives.
One thing that can be done is verify that the miner has included every transaction that was locked, say, more than 30s before the block was discovered.
 
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