Permissions Management against Block Congesiton

Question

Let's say you created a relaxed permissioned network constituted of 10 nodes with mine permissions.

Assume Nodes A2..A6 (none admin) goes rogue and starts filling the network with empty blocks. They have enough to meet the mining-turnover parameter and are clogging the network.

You, Node A1, as admin, want to cut their mining permissions. However, as far as I understand, this permission is cut using a transaction that must be inserted on the blockchain, and the attacking group can withholding including this transaction in the block.

Is it possible to use a broadcast message instead of a block transaction? At least temporarily? 

I'm eager to discuss this with you and see your thoughts!

Answer 1

First just to clarify it's the mining-diversity parameter that's relevant, not mining-turnover.

You can certainly use a stream to broadcast a message, and have other nodes see that message before it is confirmed on the blockchain. Bad miners cannot stop this message propagating between honest nodes.

This message could inform the nodes about a miner gone rogue. In response all (honest) nodes could check their list of peers for those connecting using this handshaking address, and disconnect them. This would effectively cut the bad miners out of the network and nobody honest would receive their blocks.

This assumes that the miners use the same address for connecting as mining.

And perhaps the system would be set up to require a certain number of admins to make this claim about a miner before it is applied.

Comments

Great to hear! That's exactly my line of reasoning.

Do you have any interest in this idea? Would it be something that you might think to integrate directly (or collaborate with the community/me on it?)

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We haven't yet seen a lot of demand for this, so I don't think it will be integrated into the product at this stage. But it should be quite a simple piece of external logic that polls the stream every few seconds and responds as appropriate.