What is the intent of mining-requires-peers

Question

Hi.

When should you use this option?

Since mining-diversity takes care of situations like netsplit etc.

We ran into the following issue:
mining-require-peers: false

1. Create single node
2. Create new address on single node with mining permission
3. Mining stops
4. Revoke permission
5. Mining starts again

So maybe this is an expected behaviour, but what is the idea behind this parameter?

 

Thanks,

Alex

Answer 1

This is indeed the expected behavior, as documented here:

https://www.multichain.com/developers/blockchain-parameters/

The point of mining-requires-peers is to prevent a node that becomes isolated from the network from going ahead and mining its own irrelevant chain. You are right that mining-diversity also takes care of this, but there are some chains based on proof-of-work where there is no constraint on mining diversity.

The mining-requires-peers setting is only applied if there is more than one address with mining permissions, because in this case we assume these addresses will likely be owned by multiple nodes. (Even if one nodes sees it has all these addresses in its wallet, there could have been private key sharing.)