06:01:06 this is the miner block header signing code we implemented in wownero https://git.wownero.com/wownero/wownero/commit/7f7d697f43d5bfb7d256125f30f522ca6154ea6e 06:02:09 it has been live on mainnet since 4th July 2021 06:03:48 it effectively killed off mega public pools, which over ran our network before the fork 06:04:26 but private pools and botnets are still possible 06:06:59 and i have no idea how dominate they are in the network compared to the percentage of solo miners 06:11:28 if you guys have any wild ideas on how to counter pool centralization in monero, we would be happy to test it out in our next hard fork sometime in April 06:47:50 protocol level? doesn't really seem likely 06:48:45 the only way to know you have a pool centralization problem is with a trusted oracle telling you the hashrates of all known miners 06:50:50 I guess, if pools all mine to constant addresses, you could tally a window of the last N blocks and see if certain addresses are winning too frequently? 06:51:24 but then what? ban those addresses for a time period? 06:51:52 then pools would just start rotating thru a set of miner addresses... 06:55:16 what about increasing the scratchpad in PoW to make running botnets more expensive and noticeable on unmaintained systems? 06:56:00 you think the pools are growing because of botnet hashrate? 06:56:36 we can certainly consider increasing the scratchpad, yeah 06:56:55 no, but they do make a large part of the hash in large pools 06:57:05 but it will most likely hobble the majority of PCs up to current generation 06:57:21 while the upcoming generation may have no trouble at all 06:57:49 but given the global chip crisis, getting hold of new CPUs will be difficult 06:58:37 Nobody is mining with very old hardware, except botnets 06:58:44 it'll be a different form of hardware exclusivity. maybe not as extreme as ASICs 06:59:01 I'm mining on a 6 year old phone... 06:59:18 lots of people are mining on old PCs 06:59:31 hyc: And it doesn’t matter vs botnet hashrate 06:59:59 get a billion people to mine on whatever spare phone they have at home 07:00:22 or, consciously decide to prevent a billion people from doing so. 07:00:37 I prefer the former, not the latter. 07:00:48 hyc: Good luck, we don’t even have million monero users 😅 07:02:03 with the former case, it might happen. in the latter, it definitely never will. that's not a good growth policy. 07:02:08 another idea increasing the size of ashing blob somehow in order to increase bandwidth requirements of running a pool 07:02:17 *hashing 07:02:39 hm, interesting. 07:02:51 or anything else we can crank up to increase bandwidth requirements 07:03:17 Bandwidth is cheap 07:03:31 *infinite, and latency is zero. 07:03:59 only to a certain point. even a 10Gbps interfacce will have a max packet-per-second rate 07:04:32 200g dedicated @6k 07:04:32 but not free and at scale, it becomes expensive 07:05:19 e.g. if we made the seedhash change more frequently so it was uncacheable, every job would require another roundtrip to monerod 07:05:35 or something along those lines 07:06:03 and roundtrip latencies would add up fast\ 07:07:06 a mining pool could compensate by spinning up more monerods, but each one would eat up CPU/RAM/disk resources 07:11:47 Finding ways how to keep support for botnets, interesting times indeed 07:15:39 just increasing hardware requirement is no solution. today's firebreathing new PC is tomorrow's neglected-in-acloset-somewhere old PC 07:16:42 the solution to preventing botnets is fixing PC OSs so that malware can't install them in the first place 07:18:23 here's an idea: write a program that detects vulnerable PCs running a miner, infiltrate the system, and reconfigure its miner to use p2pool 07:18:48 hyc: We have forks, just update ram requirements after a few years 07:20:49 yeah the original plan was to re-evaluate parameters every 3-5 years 07:21:32 right now we're not convinced a tweak is warranted yet. next year when DDR5 systems are generally on the market, maybe