Author: Jannes Faber 2013-11-07 08:07:56
Published on: 2013-11-07T08:07:56+00:00
In a Bitcoin-development mailing list, Peter Todd discusses his miner strategy of sending blocks to only 51% of the hash power and explains how this threshold is actually 29.3%. He states that if he finds a block, he has three possible outcomes – find the next block, probability Q; they find the next block, probability 1-Q; or they find two blocks before he finds one block or two blocks, probability (1-Q)^2. He adds that if he's trying to beat other miners, once he has >29.3% of the hashing power, he has no incentive to publish the blocks he mines. Todd further explains that as he gets further ahead, he needs less hashing power for his incentives to be to not publish the block he just found. This means that he should try to make his blocks propagate to less of the hashing power, by whatever means necessary. He concludes that the incentive structure needs to be fixed somehow before the inflation subsidy gets any smaller and raising the block size is madness given it can be used to slow down block propagation selectively, so the hashing power that gets a given block is limited repeatably to the same group.
Updated on: 2023-06-07T19:32:03.480491+00:00