Author: Jameson Lopp 2013-11-05 19:33:14
Published on: 2013-11-05T19:33:14+00:00
A paper has been published that argues that the Bitcoin ecosystem is open to manipulation and potential takeover by miners who want to maximize their rewards. The paper introduced a mining strategy called Selfish-Mine, which allows colluding miners to earn more than their mining power. This could lead to a collapse of the decentralized currency if new rational miners join selfish miner pools. However, Jameson Lopp, a software engineer, questions why any rational miner would collude to earn slightly higher short-term profits at the expense of then wiping out the value of all their bitcoins in the long term. He also questioned why the vulnerability was published publicly instead of being first disclosed privately to the core developers. Jeff Garzik responded, acknowledging that fixing bugs in the Bitcoin protocol can create other problems and any major mistake could instantly destroy over $2 billion worth of value.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T19:21:18.958874+00:00