Author: Bram Cohen 2018-06-18 20:40:26
Published on: 2018-06-18T20:40:26+00:00
The block rate cannot be significantly increased or decreased in the long run due to the work difficulty adjustment getting you roughly back where you started. However, an attacker or group of attackers could conspire to reduce block sizes to increase transaction fees. This can be done with a miner activated soft fork and may prove lucrative, particularly as block rewards fall in the future. Dilution is a potential attack where a malicious actor acquires a majority of hash power and produces valid but empty blocks, effectively reducing the block rate by half or more. This would be difficult to mitigate as nodes cannot differentiate block relay and block production. The cost of such an attack would be around $2 billion for equipment and $0.4 billion a month of power costs. It is a plausible scenario, but there are no convincing arguments against it being implausible.
Updated on: 2023-06-13T03:35:16.504989+00:00