Author: Nathan Cook 2015-06-02 11:43:29
Published on: 2015-06-02T11:43:29+00:00
In an email exchange from 2015, Mike Hearn expressed concern over the fact that a majority of the Bitcoin mining hash rate could perform double spend attacks on exchanges by selling bitcoins for cash, extracting the money, and then building a longer chain to get their bitcoins back. This would render the Bitcoin experiment a failure and lead to its abandonment. However, it was noted that the basic assumption behind Bitcoin is that only a minority of actors are dishonest, as stated in the white paper. It was also suggested that it is possible for agents to commit to honesty on a chain they support and dishonesty on a chain they oppose. Majority hashpower doesn't need to be dishonest to stop a change to large blocks, but can simply refuse to build on blocks that it doesn't like. The minority would not mine blocks larger than 1MB if they knew they would be orphaned.
Updated on: 2023-06-09T22:11:17.766355+00:00