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I've read the paper. The title is alarmist. "selfish" mining seems to work, pools should implement it as fast as possible. When a majority of them do, the probl
by Rhapso 13y ago
I've read the paper. The title is alarmist. "selfish" mining seems to work, pools should implement it as fast as possible. When a majority of them do, the problem cancels out. The given solution suggest propagating all chains and choosing a random one to mine on. Their proposed solution is immediately exploitable, as a "selfish pool" could disseminate as many competing forks as possible to dilute the processing power of the "honest" system then collaborate on a single chain.
- sktrdie 13y agoThat was my thinking as well. All pools should behave selfishly. If they all behave this way, then there's no incentive for the miners to move towards a single pool, therefore avoiding centralization. Am I missing something?
- petertodd 13y agoYes, the strategy works better if you have a lower-latency network at your disposal. What it creates is a winner-take-all situation where the mining pool with the best optimized network, some function of latency-vs-cost, gets a disproportionate reward even when all miners are pursuing this strategy.
- anigbrowl 13y agoThere is an incentive to move to the largest mining pool, since that has the greatest chance of discovering a new block and gaining a selfish advantage.