RE: The Gridcoin Fireside #6 - Gridcoin 4.0.3.0: The Scraper. This one is kind of a big deal.
Hmm... You are not trusting 5 people. The algorithm is built to cross-verify. Collusion is the real issue. Starting with the position that the scrapers are independent, it requires a bad actor to gain direct control of 60% of the number of scrapers, and publish stats in such a way to achieve convergence (i.e. matching to hash and signature). Because of hashed and signed nature of the messages, man in the middle attacks will not work. (Because the man in the middle does NOT have the private key to sign the messages properly.)
The sole issue here is the probability of non-independence of the nodes. Certainly the chance of "collusion" is higher with a low number of nodes, but getting beyond even 10 or 15, the chances of collusion between 60% of the nodes is exceedingly small.
We need to publish a list of the scraper nodes to show people that they are truly independent.
Sorry for necro-post, but collusion is about trust! haha I hear what you're saying. With 5 scraper nodes we are trusting that those 5... actually just 3 of them... will not collude.
I understand the need for security-through-privacy etc. etc. The boot-strap as is is fine. Looking forward to building it out!