Author: Patrick 2013-11-05 17:37:54
Published on: 2013-11-05T17:37:54+00:00
The proposed solution to raise the selfish mining threshold would reduce the ratio of honest miners who mine the first block they see from > 0.5 to 0.5, making the attack described easier rather than harder. The current choice among equal-length chains is arbitrary and creates vulnerability in the network topology. The proposal aims to replace it with explicit randomness, which is at the control of the protocol, without introducing new executions that were not possible with the old protocol. However, this change introduces a vulnerability for pools over a certain size to withhold blocks rather than immediately broadcasting all blocks found. When the pool eventually chooses to reveal the block they mined, 50% of the hashing power switches, thus splitting the network, which can be to their benefit. For pools over a certain size, this strategy is profitable even without investing in a low-latency network. The analysis on a deterministic switching scheme is yet to be done.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T19:20:05.818658+00:00