Author: Jorge Timón 2015-07-11 09:24:48
Published on: 2015-07-11T09:24:48+00:00
The issue of miners neglecting transaction verification is a problem that weakens the network's robustness against forks. SPV mining, which has become popular among a large portion of miners, allows consensus-violating forks to persist. The incentive for SPV mining lies in the cost of verifying transactions in a received block, as miners can save on costs by not verifying transactions. However, this creates a risk of mining atop an invalid block. If more and more miners cut this particular corner, the network becomes more brittle towards forking-persistence behavior.A malicious miner who suspects a large fraction of miners are neglecting transaction verification may choose to forego a block reward by throwing an erroneous transaction into their winning block. As all the "SPV Miners" run off along a worthless chain, the malicious miner can reap a higher reward rate due to controlling a larger network capacity fraction on the valid chain. To fix this, it would be more rational for miners to keep mining on top of the old block until they've fully validated the new block, even if this slightly increases the orphan rate. All miners should validate transactions precisely because of the latest attack described.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T02:21:58.156094+00:00