F2Pool Co-Founder Says He’s Not Cheating The Ethereum POW System

F2Pool co-founder says that he is not cheating the Ethereum POW system. Chun Wang, a co-founder of F2Pool, has replied to claims that his mining pool has tampered with Ethereum block timestamps in order to consistently increase mining rewards.

The mining pool is accused of conducting a “consensus-level” attack on Ethereum over the past two years in order to gain an advantage over “honest” miners, according to claims made in a study published on August 5 by researchers at The Hebrew University.

Wang, in response, implied that willfully abusing the system’s rules doesn’t always constitute a rule violation by writing on Twitter, “We respect the *consensus* as is.

We respect the *consensus* as is. If you don’t like the consensus, convince @TimBeiko to send me another Announcement and change it. https://t.co/Lmw2INzOzg

— Chun at 78°N (@satofishi) August 8, 2022

A “consensus-level attack” on Ethereum, in which miners like F2Pool have discovered a technique to modify block timestamps in order to regularly obtain better mining rewards than mining “honestly,” was first shown, according to the researchers, earlier this week.

The research paper, which was written by computer scientist Aviv Zohar, Gilad Stern, and cryptocurrency lecturer Aviv Yaish, claims that the Ethereum mining pool F2Pool was one of the miners who had been employing this timestamp manipulation technique.

Although most mining pools create reasonably undetectable blocks, Yaish claimed that F2Pool flagrantly flouts the law by giving its blocks incorrect timestamps. He added that the mining pool has been carrying out the attack for the past two years.

Wang also gave the impression that he accepted Yaish’s testimony, which suggested that the timestamp alteration was done on purpose, but still, the F2Pool co-founder says that he is not cheating the POW system.

F2Pool is a mining pool that is geographically diversified and mostly mines blocks on the Bitcoin, Ethereum, and Litecoin networks.

How the “attack” functions

The researchers claim that Ethereum’s current proof-of-work (POW) consensus laws have a flaw that allows miners “some degree of freedom” when setting timestamps, allowing for the creation of erroneous timestamps.

“For example, a miner can start mining a block now, but set the block’s timestamp to actually be 5 seconds in the past, or 10 seconds in the future. As long as this timestamp is within a certain reasonable bound, the block will still be considered valid, according to Ethereum’s consensus laws.”

These miners have an advantage in a “tie-breaking” situation because they can replace another miner’s blocks of the same block height by setting bogus timestamps that are low enough to make mining the block more challenging.

The vulnerability may, however, be fixed after Ethereum switches to proof-of-stake (POS) with the forthcoming Merge on September 19, which employs a different set of consensus rules, the researchers added.

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