This paper acts like it's surprising that miners would cooperate and play by the rules: > Although bitcoin was designed to rely on a decentralized, trustless n

This paper acts like it's surprising that miners would cooperate and play by the rules: > Although bitcoin was designed to rely on a decentralized, trustless network of anonymous agents, its early success rested instead on cooperation among a small group of altruistic founders. But the Bitcoin whiteppaer says very clearly that it's designed to give miners and incentive to cooperate: > The incentive may help encourage nodes to stay honest. If a greedy attacker is able to assemble more CPU power than all the honest nodes, he would have to choose between using it to defraud people by stealing back his payments, or using it to generate new coins. He ought to find it more profitable to play by the rules, such rules that favour him with more new coins than everyone else combined, than to undermine the system and the validity of his own wealth. https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf