Author: Pieter Wuille 2013-07-14 19:42:06
Published on: 2013-07-14T19:42:06+00:00
In a discussion about the security of merge-mined coins, Luke-Jr stated that there is little protection from miners who mine invalid blocks without a cost. He argues that the value of the coin is irrelevant if the malicious miner has nothing to lose. However, Pieter disagrees and points out that invalid blocks are always rejected by validating clients. Pieter explains that the issue lies in the fact that mining an invalid block for the merge-mined chain costs the miner nothing if they have hash power for the parent chain. This goes against the basic assumption of mining security which assumes it is more profitable to collaborate with mining a chain than to attack it. In the case of merged mining, this assumption is invalid.
Updated on: 2023-05-19T17:06:19.414019+00:00