Author: Peter Todd 2013-02-14 06:07:44
Published on: 2013-02-14T06:07:44+00:00
In this email conversation, Stephen Pair discusses the strong incentive miners have to distribute blocks as widely and quickly as possible. However, the author argues that this is a misconception since miners actually benefit from guaranteeing their blocks reach just over 50% of the overall hashing power, but no more. The reason for this is due to orphans. Using an example with four Bitcoin miners, the author explains how the slowest miner can become ineffective when a block is found due to not being able to upload it fast enough. With larger blocks, this issue becomes even worse. The author argues that miners have perverse incentives when it comes to block size, which can lead to centralization of mining capacity.
Updated on: 2023-06-06T10:04:19.591116+00:00