One of our goals at the Digital Currency Initiative is to harden the security of cryptocurrency networks. Most users of cryptocurrency take the actual network protocol and all of its implementation — mining, pools, validation, messaging, and more — for granted, and aren’t necessarily aware of all the ways these mechanisms might be attacked or fail. For example, though mining pools are a huge part of Bitcoin’s network security, there isn’t any available public monitoring to make sure that mining pools are well-behaved. There isn’t even a standard way to look at what pool operators are doing or infrastructure to keep tabs on pool operators.
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