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I can't see this posing a serious threat to Bitcoin. If I understand this correctly the idea relies on mining a block and keeping it secret so that the selfish
by rheide 13y ago
I can't see this posing a serious threat to Bitcoin. If I understand this correctly the idea relies on mining a block and keeping it secret so that the selfish miners can start mining on the next coin. But they can't change the properties of the network. They'll have to respect Bitcoin's difficulty calculation, since if they try to change that, the main Bitcoin network will reject their chain. Plus, they'll need tons and tons of hashing power to stay ahead of the network.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but even if you've got future blocks precomputed for weeks in advance, all it takes is someone else finding the current block by chance to completely invalidate your private chain?
- wmf 13y agoThe threat is that the unfairness rises with pool size, encouraging the largest pool to become even larger. Once a pool becomes very large (e.g. over 50% of the hash rate) it can DoS the entire Bitcoin system or use the threat of DoS as a form of blackmail to make changes to the protocol. even if you've got future blocks precomputed for weeks in advance, all it takes is someone else finding the current block by chance to completely invalidate your private chain? No, because peers use the longest valid chain (more or less) regardless of when it is revealed.