Small Sample of Concerns Belonging to Larger Family of Unknown Real or Figurative Concerns
I would like to send my predetermined Slot Leader
reports to PoolTool, yet I only use the API key they provide for sending tip heights.
What happens when they know I won the slot lottery? At first I was very paranoid and could only imagine slot leader, even when plural for a single slot, is private information not for public disclosure. But aha, it's not! At least I am unable to find it on PoolTool after a reasonable search.
Worse though, it's not public and not private, so it's valuable information in the hands of a privileged few, or so I thought to myself. My reasoning being if I am an SPO with a relay or two, and the Whales and pre-AML/KYC bullies are around, it would be trivial to assault my nodes, and also interesting:
- Can we force a Slot Leader to fail to forge with a given attack that is cheap enough to put me back in the lottery for that slot? DDoS cheap, for example.
- Is this easier when colluding with other giants?
- Could small SPOs be denied the ability to mint new blocks in the worst case scenario of mass-collusion scenarios where the at least one of the collaborators would have a better chance at being the slot leader than they did if they were to do nothing.
Effect on Operator Behavior
So I never reported, yet I still missed two blocks when I was slot leader anyway. Now that I've probably figured out the network issues causes this, I will report my slot, just because, why not?
But still, what utility is being served by conceding privileged information to a community member, which means many things from competitor to valued contributor, but still a private third-party.
Bounty Will Likely Not Be Rewarded Within Seven Days
I am asking for a canonical answer. @Anton, tried to derive one, but I see holes that I can comment on later.
Therefore, I will delegate to the answers I find interesting, thought-provoking, reasonable-yet-contradicting, and so on; just ones I personally found valuable. I encourage you to do the same.
Upvote and ADA-only Recipients
So far these are those delegators, with the first satisfying all of the listed qualities.
- Ticker: SNOWY for Anton's Answer - OP comments,
"having the previous slot would be quite the computational challenge alone, and it does take days or weeks for those pages to populate, but they don't show a decision tree for a slot battle–maybe a deceptive illustration of 3,100 pools
POST
ing (every second as required) itsTip Height
API endpoint, which does some processing on before responding to thePOST
. Like wanting to know which node your running, if it's a release or dev build, other things it must record before responding. It does not report a Slot Battle diagram based on what delegators are reporting to relays and other delegators. I don't even think it asks if a delegator is saying it is the Slot Leader.The API has nine endpoints, but Amazon masks their location, claiming they are all in the US. But they appear to be AWS CloudFront "Web 3.0" CDNs, and that a show of good faith if CloudFront was chosen for its equal access to low-latencies ambitions:
> To deliver content to end users with lower latency, Amazon CloudFront
> uses a global network of 275+ Points of Presence (265+ Edge locations
> and 13 regional mid-tier caches) in 90+ cities across 47
> countries. Amazon CloudFront Edge locations are located in:
"Looks nice, but you can't know where they are. You can experiment, but if you just want gains you don't experiment, you stake in the most developed of Western Europe, hedging in the coasts of the US, because it had had an inflation clock downtown from me since before I was born, and the world likes it that way. AAA debt for sale for almost all of me and that clock's life, ala CIA and USN, and so on."
"Meanwhile, the orphan graph reminds me of a PoolTool page, or the other way around..."[Middle Finger Emoji to almost every stake holder]
"Okay, I'll lay off pooltool, or why it doesn't report past slot leader, leader arrays, empty slots, or pull from the verbose as the need for a reconstructed Globe Theater."
What if you just need 51% of topology pathfinders to agree that your AWS CloudFront WebAPI is gospel? You'd make a topologyUpdater script that basically reinforced this Western exploit attacking the single-second slot. Sites like PoolVet claiming if you don't comply, go let the Best Practices Group promote gain over virtue.
"And on and on," he continued ranting. "Where's the utility? What's this project really about?"