I've persistent my notes on the May 2023 Bitcoin Core node DoS problems. These are background information for the disclosure from last year. When non-ideal sorting, mass BRC-20 mints, and spy nodes caused a CPU Denial-of-Service on the Bitcoin network:.

cool to see the iterations on this since last year . (

Love this new merkle branch Sankey on great job csjones and @boerst!

RT @ajtowns: Anyone have the contents of the stale block at height 635366 with hash 0000000000000000000e83ae1e2f069094cc1deab4aede641e028df….

This is one of my favorite bitcoin blockchain visuals. The share of low/high r and S values in ECDSA signatures. First high-S is made non-standard and then wallets begin to grind r-values to make smaller signatures.

With 100% of the hashrate, it would currently take about 800 days to rewrite the complete Bitcoin block chain.

In sum, there have been about 2^96.5 hash attempts for Bitcoin mining (the cumulative log2(work) is 96.5). It's clearly visible when GPU and ASIC mining started.

Currently, more than ~500000000000000000000000 (500 zeta or 5×10²³) hash attempts are required on average to mine a block.

This is the current hashrate distribution among the top 5 pools when taking AntPool & friends into account.

More than 42 BTC are now forever lost in provably unspendable OP_RETURN outputs.

There have been close to 1200000000 (1.2 billion) transactions on Bitcoin.

There are currently about 172M UTXOs. Here is the UTXO set composition by output type:.

The "Mining Centralization Index" (with proxy pools) is now updated daily on mainnet-observer:.

RT @stephanlivera: DMND: The First Full SV2 Mining Pool with Alejandro de la Torre | SLP649.Fixing the problems of FPPS and centralized blo….

proxy pools* not proxy lools.

And the above index ignores the fact that we have proxy pools like AntPool & friends. If we include them, the top 2 pools mine more than 60% of the blocks and the top 6 pools mine more than 95%. Foundry and AntPool & friends need to shrink.

I introduce a Mining Centralization Index. Pooled Bitcoin mining was most decentralized in May 2017 and also did OK between 2019 and 2022. Today, we are close to an all time high in centralization.

In the current Bitcoin mining landscape with proxy lools like AntPool & friends, 6 mining pools produce and mine more than 95% of the block templates. Bitcoin mining is highly centralized today.

How many distinct mining pools should mine >95% of the blocks for Bitcoin mining to be considered not centralized? Pick the smallest number you would be comfortable with.

Reposting this disclosure from last year because I think it's fun and touches multiple areas of the Bitcoin mining tech stack:. Wasting 1.8×10²¹ or 1.8 zeta hashes mining on an old block by sending a single P2P message.