Author: Peter Todd 2013-11-04 21:04:51
Published on: 2013-11-04T21:04:51+00:00
In this email conversation, Ittay proposed a solution to alleviate the concern of rational motivation of individual miners in Bitcoin mining. However, he later retracted the solution, admitting his misunderstanding of the paper. The email then goes on to explain the possibility of a selfish miner, Alice, who has an unusually good knowledge of the state of the network and connectivity to all miners, enabling her to keep new blocks a secret and gradually gain more miners and revenue by building on her own blocks instead of others. It is suggested that a rule be implemented where miners extend Bob's block 50% of the time to prevent this scenario, but it is still better for rational miners to mine on the block they hear about first rather than using this rule. The idea of making it easy to identify nodes associated with hashing power is also discussed, with the conclusion that it only makes it easier for Alice to identify where she needs to send her blocks to distribute them to the majority as quickly as possible, allowing her to win the race. Additionally, the use of nLockTime makes the selfish miner strategy even more profitable. Finally, the problem of latency centralizing control in a single pool or physical location is mentioned, and the fact that Alice can reliably mine significantly more valuable transactions when she maintains a lead over other miners is noted.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T19:11:38.349298+00:00