Bitcoin btc guild
BTC Guild, one of the bigger mining pools, released a series of 4 blocks in quick succession today. Bitcoin difficulty is adjusted to achieve a block to be mined roughly every 10 minutes, whereas the blocks in this chain were released within a few minutes of each other.
Since this is a relatively rare event, it triggered a discussion on what could account for this. Some people prudently asked whether this could be a sign of selfish mining. Let's do a quick check through the evidence. A series of blocks released in quick succession is indeed a sign of selfish mining activity, though it is not definitive i. While selfish miners will occasionally release series of blocks, they do not necessarily need to release multiple blocks every time; selfish mining can be profitable even when the selfish miner releases a single block at a time.
A necessary sign of successful selfish mining, however, is that there be a corresponding abandoned chain, rooted at the same blockchain height as the first block released by the suspected selfish miner. This abandoned chain would be of length equal to or one block shorter than the number of blocks released by the selfish miner.
Misnomers indicate muddled thinking, and Satoshi himself does not use the term, so we'll stick to the more apt term "abandoned. This is partly why identifying selfish miners is difficult. While the quick succession of blocks is clearly present in this case, there is no evidence of an abandoned chain in blockchain. Bitcoin's decentralized architecture makes the detection of abandoned blocks difficult.
A to-be-abandoned in a hypothetical scenario block may indeed arise somewhere in the network, trigger a selfish miner to double-down with his pre-mined and privately-held blocks, and then simply get discarded by intermediaries who adopt the longer chain offered by the selfish miner. So it's possible for a blockchain reporting website to miss bona-fide abandoned blocks, especially if the website is connected to the Bitcoin network via a small number of peers.
And this is part of the other reason why it is difficult to tell when a selfish mining attack is being launched. Getting back to BTC Guild, the chances of a public solving blocks, triggering the release of 4 selfishly mined blocks in a row, all of which lead to abandoned blocks that are not recorded anywere are actually very small.
There would have to be at least 3 independently computed and later abandoned blocks, all of which must have lost out to the selfish miner. Unless this selfish miner is particularly adept at gaming the network and winning the races in such a definitive way to leave no trace of three separate abandoned blocks injected into the network from likely different locations, we'd expect to find some evidence when a relatively long series of blocks are involved.
Not to mention, it would not make sense for a respected and public pool such as BTC Guild to engage in selfish mining under its own name. A smart selfish miner would use fresh Bitcoin addresses and hop between IP addresses to hide her tracks. But how do you get bitcoins? You can begin by buying them outright, but the market is currently wild. In short, you should probably mine.
But what is bitcoin mining? Think of it as work done by groups of people to find large prime numbers or trying keys to decrypt a file. In fact, many wager that the DDOS attacks on many bitcoin-related services are direct action by hackers to inject instability in order to reduce the price.
As it stands, mining solo is very nearly deprecated. The process of finding blocks is now so popular and the difficulty of finding a block so high that it could take over three years to generate any coins. While you could simply set a machine aside and have it run the algorithms endlessly, the energy cost and equipment deprecation will eventually cost more than the actual bitcoins are worth.
Pooled mining, however, is far more lucrative. While this is simplified, it is basically how the system works. You work for shares in a block and when complete you get a percentage of the block based on the number of workers alongside you, less fees.
The astute among you will note that I probably used twice that amount of electricity. My buddy Tom explained how to set up a pooled mining account so I thought it would be interesting to share the instructions. You can either store your wallet locally or store it online. Wallets require you to use or download a fairly large blockchain file — about 6GB — so downloading and updating a local wallet may be a non-starter.
There is no preferred wallet type and there are obvious trade-offs to both. Privacy advocates would probably say a local wallet is best. You can download a local wallet here but make sure you keep a copy of your data backed up.
This, without the period, is a direct way to send bitcoins to your wallet. Make a note of your address. In Coinbase, the wallet address found under linked accounts. To mine in a pool you have to work with a group of other miners on available blocks. You can also try guilds like BTC Guild as well as a number of other options. Pools with fewer users could also have a slower discovery time but pools with many users usually result in smaller payments.