Author: Marc Bevand 2017-11-08 05:04:07
Published on: 2017-11-08T05:04:07+00:00
In a discussion on the bitcoin-dev mailing list, Robert Taylor asked about a potential failure mode of Bitcoin mining. He described a scenario where a majority of miners could form a cartel and validly orphan any blocks made by miners outside of their group. This would be possible by soft forking a new rule where the block number is signed by a set of keys known only to the cartel and placing that signature in the coinbase. While this would be immediately obvious, it would still be valid under the consensus rules. Marc replied that this situation is an example of a majority attack or "51% attack", and while there is no technical mechanism in Bitcoin preventing it, miners are not incentivized to perform this attack as it would destroy confidence in Bitcoin and ultimately impact their revenues. In other words, while it may be possible for one actor to gain a majority of hash power alone, it is much less likely with collusion because miners have a strong financial incentive to act in the best interest of the network.
Updated on: 2023-06-12T22:05:45.165682+00:00