(8/12) By analyzing publicly available on-chain data, we can finally say that the answer to the long-standing question “do miners attack the consensus layer of major cryptocurrencies?” is yes! Specifically, F2Pool’s blocks have the fingerprint of the attack all over them. …
Uncle Maker
Ethereum’s consensus mechanism is still in the form of Proof-of-Work (PoW), which will move to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) will be released this September. However, at this point the network appears to be susceptible to attacks as the research has mentioned.
The consensus attack is called the Uncle Maker attack in the report, in reference to the “Uncle” block used to exploit the blockchain within the Ethereum blockchain that functions as a repository, distribution, and monitoring chain across the chain. The Uncle block chain is a legitimate block that has been removed from the main chain but still rewards miners.
“Such attacks will cause the attacker to replace the main competitor’s blockchain with its own block. This causes the miners of the replaced block to incur all transaction fees for transactions placed on the block. This will downgrade the blockchain from the main chain.”
Miners can set internal block timestamp. A “reasonable scope” is typically within a few seconds. One mining pool that was excluded in the research was F2Pool, where “in the last 2 years F2Pool has not had a single time-stamped block” that matched the expected results. F2Pool was one of the groups. The largest Ethereum miner that operates with a hashrate of 129 TH/s and is rewarded by mining around 1500 ETH per day.
The report also emphasizes that “the founder of F2Pool has saidcondemnOther mining clans that competed with them were very close. They claim that they are attacking their own mining pools,” while in fact “F2Pool is attacking other mining groups.”
The impact on mining revenue has yet to be formally identified, with CryptoSlate speaking to Aviv, who he said.
“For each successful attack, F2Pool earns 14% of the block reward and also receives all available transaction fees. We are currently trying to come up with a concrete estimate for the block reward and transaction fees. Using real-world information that will be published as soon as we have it!”
Source: CryptoSlate