Published on: 2015-06-02T11:43:29+00:00
The article discusses a concern raised by Mike Hearn in 2015 regarding the potential for a majority of Bitcoin mining hash rate to perform double spend attacks on exchanges. The fear is that these miners could sell their bitcoins for cash, extract the money, and then build a longer chain to retrieve their bitcoins, which would ultimately lead to the failure and abandonment of the Bitcoin experiment.Hearn points out that the basic assumption behind Bitcoin is that only a minority of actors are dishonest, as stated in the white paper. However, it is possible for agents to commit to honesty on a chain they support and dishonesty on a chain they oppose. This means that the majority hashpower doesn't need to be dishonest to stop a change to larger blocks; they can simply refuse to build on blocks that they don't like. On the other hand, the minority would not mine blocks larger than 1MB if they knew those blocks would be orphaned.In summary, if the majority of the mining hash rate can perform double spend attacks, they could undermine the integrity of Bitcoin by selling bitcoins for cash, extracting the money, and building a longer chain to retrieve their bitcoins. This raises concerns about the viability of the Bitcoin experiment, as it relies on the assumption that only a minority of actors are dishonest.
Updated on: 2023-08-01T13:02:16.577785+00:00