speaking of Bitcoin ... the july4th split

[Troy Benjegerdes]

On Mon, Jul 06, 2015 at 04:06:36AM +0900, Lodewijk andré de la porte wrote:
> Half the net is SPV... MINING???
> 
> They got what they had coming, though.
> 
> Very strange to not spend a tease on full validation :s
> 
> Maybe they hope to save some time and start mining that new block earlier?
> Seems they lost quite a bit more than they might've ever saved now.

Give me a large mining pool with a dedicated low-latency (worldwide)
network and I bet I can show a marginally higher rate of return (more
blocks) by running SPV mining software.

What's unknown is if the network + wrong-fork costs exceed the return
from being able to start mining a new block sooner or not.

This is a very small advantage with Bitcoin. 

But with any short-block coin (litecoin) or the 1-minute altcoins, seconds
(or maybe even milliseconds) matter. On the 1-minute alts you could have 
40% of the hashpower and probably get 60-80% of the blocks by starting 
mining earlier and then mining on top of blocks you just found.