[Cryptography] Electronic currency revived after 20-year hiatus

[Peter Todd]

On Thu, Aug 18, 2016 at 03:21:02AM +0200, Natanael wrote:
> There's a lot of talk about "selfish mining" that would lower the
> percentage to ~33% in the worst case in theory, but it requires that the
> other miners are naive, that *nobody else does the same thing* (if
> everybody does it as it nearly cancels out itself when everybody does it
> (with the exception for marginally improving the profitability for larger
> miners/pools) and requires that those doing it are well connected in the
> network (which is difficult if you chose to not participate in the
> efficient relay networks that most big miners participate in, or if you get
> blacklisted from it due to abuse).

FWIW, selfish mining is of theoretical interest, but there are more concerning
- and more pratical - attacks, including "attacks" which aren't clearly
attacks, and can also happen by accident. This is concerning, because while
selfish mining is relatively obvious and can be defeated by "out-of-band"
social mitigations, it's much harder to do that when attacks have plausible
deniability. I gave a good summary of these effects a few weeks ago:

https://petertodd.org/2016/block-publication-incentives-for-miners

Fortunately the limited blocksize of Bitcoin does a reasonably good job of
mitigating the potential harm of these attacks right now, but they're serious
constraints on scaling transaction volume with existing technology.

-- 
https://petertodd.org 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
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