Last week we released the update causing the hard fork of the chain as the response to the complex and sophisticated attack aimed at destabilizing the LINC network by producing a huge amount of consistent orphaned blocks forged by the legit mining pools.
Previously we suspected a possible timestamp bug, but then we declined this hypothesis. Since our project is the fork of Dash with the changes not concerning the process of block forging, we should accept the fact that with the existence of such bug it probably would be used, first and foremost, on bigger networks, including the Dash network.
Considering a possible causes, we strongly believe for this moment, that such attack was able to be carried out due to the low, varying and insufficient for ensuring the network stability hashrate, which is a phenomenon typical of the early stage of the mining process.
Our response was a total blocking of all the inputs of the attacker, with the further compensations to those, who was affected by the consequences of the attack.
But we realise that since the network hashrate is still low and unstable, this attack as well as other tricks and hacks could be repeated. In this regard, we made a research, in which some possible attacking vectors aimed at gaining highest reward have been considered.
It’s a fact, that the longest chain is always choosed by the nodes as the main chain. It’s a good working model until the hash power is distributed among a quite large amount of miners and no one has an ability to exceed the total hashrate of the network.
In general, if someone, who has enough hash power to exceed the current hashrate, creates his own private pool and joins the mining process, he probably will forge most of the blocks (but not all of them). Of course, it’s fair enough, but on the condition that no hacks or tricks are used.
But, the private chain could be forked, with intention to have all the discovered block rewards. Pool keeps its forged blocks private, thereby intentionally forking the chain. The honest nodes continue to mine on the public chain, while the pool mines on its own private branch. The blocks from this private branch could be revealed to the public at any time, and if more chainwork is done, this branch will be selected as main. Of course, it has a serious impact, such as the decline of all previous blocks (as well as their rewards) on public chain, and a possibility to carry out the doublespend attack.
We strongly belive that this is the attack that was carried out on our network before the fork.
These problems are not so relevant to the networks, where a huge distributed hash powers are involved. But that’s highly relevant to the networks, where insufficient amount of the miners are involved to ensure the stability and to be able to deal with a “greedy whales” of the early mining.
Through the joint efforts of the LINC Team and our Tech and Business Adviser MLT, a number of measures had been developed, in order to significantly reduce the intention of dishonest and selfish miners to carry out the attacks described above.
These measures are described in the concept called “Aequilibrium”.
AEQUILIBRIUM is a concept describing the set of measures, required for ensuring the fair and favourable conditions for the early mining. The main idea is to prevent a number of attacking vectors, that are highly probable an easily performable on the networks with the low and unstable hashrate.
Since we still working on the improvement of its main provisions, we decided to implement this update in the multi-step approach.
We are glad to announce the first step to be implemented:
1) Pool registration
We’re going to create the whitelist of the addresses of allegedly honest mining pools, which will be the only ones who can forge a block. Initially, the registration will be performed with the each update of the client, as a list of hardcoded addresses. In the future updates, the Governance system will be implemented to control this list. In addition, some kind of automatic listing/delising procedure will be released.
2) Same forger penalty
To distribute hash power among the different pools, we decided to implement a penalty for the same forger. The main idea is to avoid the concentration of majority of miners on the same pool, therefore, to evenly distribute a hash power among the registered pools.
Thus, we’re commited to make the process of the mining more transparent and fair.
We believe that the usage of the public and verified mining pools is the best option for the network on its early stage.
Along with this, we don’t have an intention to completely disable a solo mining through the private pools. Besides, we have a clear vision how to have it enabled, however, to avoid an attacks. These ideas will be implemented in the next step of the update. More details will be provided soon.
Thus, we declare, that LINC will be THE FIRST COIN, which will be able to provide THE MOST FAIR AND FAVOURABLE CONDITIONS FOR THE EARLY MINING.
