Author: Tier Nolan 2015-07-11 16:26:30
Published on: 2015-07-11T16:26:30+00:00
The discussion revolves around the potential issues that may arise if hashing is not constantly applied all the time. Pools would offer a price per hash based on how much transaction fees they can get at that moment, and offering more than that would mean they make a loss on average. If there are no interesting fees in the mempool at the start of a block, rational miners will power down their hashing to save energy costs until the fees become worthwhile. The hardware would be able to power down nearly instantly, but switching to an altcoin is pretty much instant. A malicious miner would choose to spend their 5 minutes re-mining the previous block, but dropping some amount of the transactions from it, which would offer everyone else an extra 0.5 BTC (5%) if they mine on top of their re-mined block. Rational miners would definitely choose to build on the re-mined block because they get more reward from doing so. However, if there are always useful fees available to mine immediately after a block is found, then everyone will keep mining and the incentives to try to deliberately orphan the last block are dramatically reduced.
Updated on: 2023-06-10T02:19:38.357022+00:00