Comment by ogogmad | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ogogmad | Hacker News Reader

This might not even be news to the people in the knows.

@foldfinance says We have known this to be the case with F2Pool for awhile but flashbots refuses to do anything

See https://nitter.42l.fr/foldfinance/status/1555477252736897024...

@railgun_project says This is a well known drawback of proof-of-work systems that was talked about even before Ethereum was launched. It is inaccurate to say that this is a recent "disclosure"

See https://nitter.42l.fr/railgun_project/status/155556027729019...

@mesquka says Not as big of a discovery as it's made to seem IMO. Essentially just intentionally caused temporary chain forks to gain a competitive mining advantage. Known as an issue in PoW since Bitcoin launch (see any discussion about 'Longest Chain Rule' and things like 'Selfish Mining')

See https://nitter.42l.fr/mesquka/status/1555562671575023618#m

> @railgun_project says This is a well known drawback of proof-of-work systems that was talked about even before Ethereum was launched. It is inaccurate to say that this is a recent "disclosure"

this isn't an inherent weakness of proof-of-work systems, it's a weakness of proof-of-work systems that allow difficulty back-off if a block is not found quickly enough.

It's always been kinda hilarious watching the various crypto factions slapfight and strawman each other to hell and back... ladies, please, you're all awful, each in your own way.

(coming from a person who backs neither and merely follows crypto-tech in order to refute the arguments more accurately)

All the tweets about it being a well known drawback are missing the point: yes, we knew that there's a general class of attacks affecting PoW this way, but it's the first time AFAIK that there's been public evidence of this attack actually occurring.

To reaffirm Ar-Curunir, even the author of the original selfish mining paper thinks this is a big deal: https://twitter.com/ittayeyal/status/1555665714178101249

And now, the second author of the selfish mining paper joins in: https://twitter.com/el33th4xor/status/1555926860067921920

Finally, even @foldfinance and @mesquka are toning down their comments. @foldfinance: "F2pool is doing additional exploitive behavior besides the one described here, sorry if that was not clear in our tweet." @mesquka: "Yes, the specific execution of this particular attack is unique to ethereum due to it's dynamic difficulty adjustment, but block withholding and timestamp manipulation as a class of attacks are well known."

Reply on news.ycombinator.com