Bitcoin Forum

http://timothyblee.com/2011/04/19/bitcoins-collusion-problem/

Does Timothy B Lee raise a good point here? We don't want splinter networks do we?

Splinter networks are good if you already hold bitcoins because you can spend them once on each branch!

Not new nor brilliant. Discussed months ago back in December.

http://inertia.posterous.com/bitcoin-mining-cartels-a-total-non-threat

A few days ago I described a similar idea in "How a social attack could defeat a prosperous Bitcoin network".

I don't think Mr. Lee's idea of a few rich people getting together to change the client software for their benefit would work well. It would be hard to spread the corrupted client to a broad enough user base. Remember that today every single client verifies that the rules are being followed, and people usually don't update often. So in the beginning while the client was spreading, its transactions would be considered faulty and they'd be ignored. This would give everyone a good incentive /not/ to use the client - including the rich bankers.

In my scenario the client software is more slowly replaced with a corrupted version using a combination of social and legal powers. Its malicious effects are concealed during the transitionary period. I believe this to be a more realistic attack. http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6007.0 (http://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=6007.0)

I rescind my criticism. I need to reread the critic's article.

What about the mining pool.

The current top two pools combined would account for close to half the network hashrate.

Isn't this basically two miners with lots of workers?

Do pools make collusion too easy?

Would it be wise to have some of the more efficient miners in the pools branch out to smaller pools or go solo?

By the way, I'm not making any accusations, just questioning!

There are two distinct issues being discussed here:
The original article discusses a fork caused by a substantial fraction of the network suddenly adopting an incompatible set of rules.
The recent observation is that a relatively small number of miners control a large fraction of the hashing power and could plausibly form a cartel.
Both are worth discussing in their own right but the share little commonality.

I believe that both problems would leave clear evidence on aggregate although the fault in individual instances could probably not be decided. There seems to be no evidence to suggest that either is a problem at the moment.

The success or failure of a rule-change bitcoin fork will be determined by similar factors as the success/failure of an open-source software fork as similar pressures operate. The fork has to be adopted and the new code base must be maintained. A lack of adoption causes a lack of incentive to maintain and develop the code. Eventually, one or other version has fewer bugs, is easier to use, has better features or becomes a standard for some other reason unrelated to its quality.

On the topic of mining cartels: I believe that as the value of bitcoin rises and the ability to quickly convert bitcoins into cash improves, the incentive to develop the programming and organizational infrastructure to enable mining cartels will become hard to resist.
Much of the essential infrastructure development could be rationalized by the major miners in positive terms as an improvement to the stability and robustness of the network. A similar development has occurred in the conventional banking/financial sector over the last hundred years or so.
 
ByteCoin

He is also proposing that if more and more people start using services like "MyBitcoin" and alike, these services could just get together and change the protocol... especially if the majority adopts this kind of usage instead of running the clients themselves.

This sounds at least theoretically possible

That's absolutely possible, but it's equivalent to those services just stealing your Bitcoins. If they take valid Bitcoins from you with the promise to return them and then deliver Pesos or Rubles or SnapCoins instead they are just thieves and they don't need to collude to do that.
 

I'm afraid we are doomed to see always the same newbies who try to appear smart by bringing always the same arguments against bitcoin.

We very much need to have a good FAQ in order to answer to these guys with a simple link.

There isn't really a single answer. What he says is quite possible.

I don't think it's likely because if you look at other successful protocols on the internet, they ossify very quickly. Just because most email users are on {gmail,hotmail,yahoo} doesn't mean the rules of email can suddenly be forked (bitter experience spells this out). Merchants in particular are likely to run their own nodes and that means a few miners upgrading along with MyBitcoin wouldn't work. It'd have to be nearly everyone. That's hard to do even when there's universal agreement, let alone when the changes are controversial!

If online wallet sites similar to Mybitcoin were to collude to attack the system this way, what happens to them once the depositors get wind of it?

What would an online Bitcoin bank run look like?  And why wouldn't the threat of same limit collusion to start with?

The important thing to remember is that the block chain is what determines the rules. If a transaction doesn't get into the block chain, it's not valid. Since the miners determine what goes into the block chain, the miners are the ones who can change the rules.

That's not quite correct. Miners can include whatever stuff they want into a block and solve it. Broadcasting it does not mean it will be accepted by other nodes. Bitcoin verifies the blocks follow the rules regardless of whether they are mining or not.

Yes.  This was the key point that Tim B. Lee missed.  If a miner includes a 100 BTC generation inside a block, rather than the normal 50, all bitcoin nodes except that miner would reject the block as invalid.  If several miners collude to create 100 BTC blocks, everyone else -- namely people holding bitcoins, an audience that matters to miners -- would reject those blocks.

Like a democracy, people would have to vote for a bitcoin change by downloading and running the new software.

The miners cannot go completely "off the reservation" without agreement from users.

And even clients that do not generate get a vote, by simply refusing to propagate rejected blocks to their peers.  Much of the network wouldn't even see those modified blocks.

There's something you're all overlooking.

The eventual goal is to have the majority of the network running light clients, which only have the block headers - no transactions. So (once light clients are the norm) the majority of the network won't even notice if miners overpay themselves. All they'll get is the block hash and the Merkle tree.

Suppose we have a cartel of miners (I am, of course, referring to a hypothetical cartel of unscrupulous miners, and in no way implying that any of the current miners or pools would try this).

Suppose the cartel members decide to change the rules, and agree that they will pay themselves a 100BTC bounty per block. As soon as they implement this, of course, their blocks will be rejected by miners that follow Satoshi's rules (I'll call these miners "orthodox miners"). We will then have a block chain split. Orthodox miners will continue to build on the one side, and the cartel will continue to build on the other side.

Both the orthodox miners and the cartel miners will confirm new transactions, and will continue to protect against double-spend attacks, so it doesn't matter which chain the users follow. Observant users might notice that the confirmations are taking longer than usual, but that's about all they will see.

If the cartel controls a sufficient portion of the mining power, then eventually their block chain will be recognized by all the light clients on the network as the main chain, and the light clients will abandon the orthodox chain.

Now, of course there will likely still be "heavy" clients out there, i.e. clients that for one reason or another do reject non-conforming transactions or blocks. They will, of course, reject the cartel's block chain, and continue to support the orthodox miners.

100 blocks after the split, the coins generated on either side of the split will mature, and the miners will want to start spending them. The cartel miners will only be able to spend their coins with light clients, and the orthodox miners will only be able to spend their coins with the heavy clients. And therein lies the key to whether the cartel succeeds or fails: how many heavy clients will there be, and how many light clients?

I can see three possible outcomes:
1) The heavy clients don't have enough influence, so the orthodox miners have nowhere to spend their money, and are forced to give in and accept the new rules; at this point the heavy clients will have no choice but to follow;

2) There are sufficient heavy clients, and the orthodox miners can get a patched light client out to enough general users that there is a permanent split in the block chain;

3) There are enough heavy clients that someone notices an unusually large number of "invalid" blocks being generated, and the orthodox miners get a patched client out quickly enough to foil the cartel.

So, it may be difficult, but not impossible, for a determined set of miners who control a sufficiently large portion of the network processing power to change the rules. Some of the rules, anyway.

Now, if we ensure that the light clients get the block and the first transaction (i.e. the miner's payout) then this attack will be more difficult. Still possible, but more difficult. In that case, the cartel has to provide its own client which ignores the payout rules, and entice enough of the users to install their client. Once they have enough installed, then they can try the coup d'etat.

Does everybody realise how easy it would be to detect such an "unorthodox miner" ??

The software THAT YOU HAVE INSTALLED on your computer does it, and even you can do it "manually".

The reward transaction is the first one in the block:  you just have to look at it.

After block 210,000, If the reward is greater than 25BTC (apart from transaction fees), then you have been silly enough to install the cartel's version of the software.   In that case, all you have to do is uninstall this software and reinstall Satoshi's or Gavin's version.

End of story.

How hard is that?

To me, this Timothy Lee's article has been given way too much credit.  It's not a new idea, and it's not even smart.

Bitcoin is not a democracy:  nobody has to suffer from the stupidity of the majority of people.

You've missed my point. Yes, the CURRENT software will detect it. But FUTURE versions that use the block-header-only protocol WILL NOT.

Ok I confess I don't know much about this light version of the protocol.  I'll have to read more about that.

By the way:


Wait - does that mean if Bitcoin becomes generally accepted, we'll all become stupid because we'll be in the majority? :-D

Anyway, as often, the answer can be found in Satoshi's paper:

Do you have any proof for these allegations?

Well, yes (I don't know if 1000 people would be enough though).   So what?

Also, if it's an University professor that does that with tax payer money, it's not much liberal, you know.

Anyway, even if it's with their own money or if we consider that a university professor can do whatever he wants with his money even if it comes from tax payer (I don't know about univeristies in your country, but in mine, most of them are financed by gov.), I guess they can indeed mess with other people's business and try to destroy what other people have built.

It would only reveal a weakness in bitcoin, which somehow would be a good thing.

Well, I said that bitcoin is not democratic but indeed I was wrong.

As Satoshi wrote it clearly from the very beginning, the network can be corrupted by any group of people which can obtain and maintain 50% of the processing power.

Bitcoin is neither.  Bitcoin is simply a monetary system.  There is no ideology there, and any that people project upon it is their own doing.


I doubt that, seriously.  Just looking at the ongoing hashing power doesn't tell the whole story.  I'd wager that there are plenty of people with respectable hashing power that do not presently participate, that would be willing to generate at a loss if an ongoing attack were to become evident.  That includes myself.  Granted, there is no way to know how much hashing power remains in reserve.  But is is easily false to assume that there isn't any.

And my my rough calculations, an attacker would need roughly 31K GPU's just to overtake the honest network at this writing.

It would be some kind of a cyberwar.

On one side, bitcoin adepts.   On the other side, supporters of centralised government based national currencies.

Good thing is that such war would not recquire guns or explosive, but GPU cards and electricity.

Could be fun.

Bitcoin is not about the people fighting the elite.

There are the bitcoin natural elites, but they earn their position through merit and hard work. They don't even have political power. Their position is entirely built on respect. Not the kind of respect that you show to authorities because you fear them, but the kind of respect because you recognize their contribution to humanity or that they are good at something.

You also have to remember that there are some individuals who are bitcoin wealthy, probably satoshi.

In any case, the same level of security that the bitcoin have, you can now have because of the algorithms and the spread of ubiquitous computing.  In the world of governments and state, only the rich have the tools to evade tax. Now the poor can do so if it is necessary for survival.

Why would they do that? The US government is one of Tor's biggest users!

It will be extremely easy to turn the public against BitCoin and that public sentiment can then be capitalised upon to try to bring down the network. Having a large install base will make matters easier, as I wrote in "How a social attack could defeat a prosperous Bitcoin network".

That is why it is my hope that BitCoin will grow only slowly and mostly outside of the public eye. It might be precisely the 'somewhat emotional reactions' which are needed to protect the network: if that's the majority of the user population, resistance to subversion of the network is all but guaranteed.

The underlying technology is in my opinion solid but there is no technology that can protect against human foolishness.

I am interested in case studies of such social attack by the government. It seems that the government have a very powerful propaganda arm.

It's a widespread belief but I am interested in evidence.

That is easily solved by having light clients demand to see the first transaction in each new block. It can be linked back to the header with a merkle branch.

The protocol today does not support this, so you have to download full blocks anyway. In future it probably will and then the additional rules can be checked like that.

It's not a big deal, IMHO.

Sure it would.  The first transaction in every block is the special transaction that gives the miner his 50 bitcoin reward.  If every light client were checking that transaction to keep the miners honest, there wouldn't be any way to collude, as the lightweight clients would reject the blocks themselves and keep searching the Bitcoin network for blocks that used the proper reward amount.

Yeah but this transaction is at the bottom of the Merkle tree, isn'it?   This means that the light client should store a whole branch of the tree, which defeats the purpose of a "light" client I guess.

Maybe we could restructure the Merkle tree and have the special transaction be on the top, just aside the root of all the other transactions.

No, because each client would only have to download however many hashes in the tree to lead to that transaction, and then that transaction itself.  In a huge block, we might be talking about three or four dozen 256 bit long hashes and one very small transaction. (no inputs, one output, nothing special to take up space).  Yes, that would be much more bandwidth than just the headers; but still much less than downloading a full block with 3000+ variable sized transactions in it.  Once it was downloaded and checked, the light client could simply throw it all away except the 80 byte header.


Interesting idea, but this could be a breaking change.  Better to make certain that such a thing were actually required, and if so, simply alter the headers to include the special transaction.

What am I missing then?  An incorrect mining reward invalidates the block.  Presently, full clients do check for this, and violators are ignored.  The net effect being that it doesn't matter how much power the colluding violators throw at the problem, the honest network simply ignores anything that they come up with.  The violators can, presently, either mine honestly or attempt to rewrite the recent blocks of the blockchain, but that's a different attack vector.  The claim that I saw basicly says that the collusion problem is because future clients will be dominated by lightweight clients, which presumedly wouldn't pay any attention to the actual blockchain reward; and this would permit a small cabal of well heeled miners to collude into changing the rules and segmenting the other honest miners into a minory blockchian because the majority of clients would blindly accept blocks produced that were invalid due to an overly high block reward, but reject the minority chain being produced by the honest miners that remained because they would have a shorter proof-of-work chain.
Yet, if the lightweight clients even occasionally check the validity of the block reward, or even only a fraction of smartphone clients did this; the attack is undermined.

How am I wrong?

Are you refering to the attack vector that requires over 50% of the hashing power of the network, with the intent of overwriting recent blocks?  The forced double spending attack?

I'm not sure this is a correct way to see things.  Spending money to do something is not an other way to say that you buy it.   When you buy something, at the end you own it, which means that nobody can take it back from you if you don't want to sell.   On the opposite, if at some point you spend enough money to acquire more than 50% of the bitcoin processing power, it doesn't belong to you anyway.  Because at any moment someone else could do the same and take back the majority of CPU even if you don't agree with that.  It's not a commercial transaction.

On the contrary. I have only monitored this forum for a few weeks and just about every other thread is about what would happen if someone applied a huge amount of processing power against the rest of the network. You're one in the line of a generation of BitCoin users very concerned about systemic threats.

I'm still not clear on what you imagine the attacker would do though. Like the original essay says, the attacker can double spend or try to block transactions from being recorded at all. But if his goal was to erase his debt worth X money, it seems reasonable to expect the economy as a whole to be substantially larger than X. The people invested in the economy as a whole, rather than that one debt of X, would therefore have a hugely larger amount of money to implement countermeasures with. And it'd make economic sense to do so.

If you are ready to spend more than 50% of what the whole BitCoin economy is worth to take it out you'd be better off not doing so and just keeping the money.

Stop talking about "the central bank of the bitcoin economy".  There is simply no such thing, apart in your mind.

There could be a large collusion of attackers, but since they would try to disrupt the bitcoin network, there is no way we can call them "the bitcoin central bank".    In a centralised economy, a central bank is supposed to organise and protect the economy, not to destroy it.

A simple solution to that would be for thin clients to randomly verify blocks. Those clients would still be substantially thinner than those checking the whole chain, and finding one bad block would be sufficient to invalidate a whole bad fork. Satoshi also proposed a p2p alert system. Such a system would be slightly vulnerable to spam (someone could try to spread alerts about many blocks) but the worst case outcome would be that all thin clients would temporarily turn into fat clients.


Obviously if the majority (the 'populist will') switched their clients to do something non-standard they could change the truth of the network. That's what I described in my social attack post. I would not describe that as unrecognised though given that the whole system is founded on the idea of "one CPU, one vote".

I see.  I don't consider this a real problem, even though it is relatively cheap at present.  The big reason is that the network is very young, and the whole value of the currency relatively small; so the primary motivation of such an attacker would be the outright destruction of Bitcoin.  The only group with such a motive would be powerful western central banks and their governments.  No small group, but the rest of the world's governments then have a vested interest in anything that stands to weaken western central banks, which includes relative heavyweights such as Brazil and China.  Also, this attack would have to continue for a significant period of time to actually destroy Bitcoin, and has nearly zero chance of altering any significant portion of the blockchain history.  Savy users are going to suspend their transactions if such an attack were underway, and less savy users are likely to learn about the attack in the media, also suspending transactions.  Suspensionof activities is not the same as abandonment of the currency, and any such attack, even now, is going to require the comitment of sustantial resources.  This would be something that would be hard for government agents to be able to justify to their budget aware leadership for very long, considering that there are much bigger thinkgs in this world for spooks to be throwing processing power at.  In the future, if Bitcoin grows to become a real threat to the status quo, it would also be too big to break.

It seems to me that you miss one point.  The attack that was discussed here doesn't only consist in gathering more than 50% of CPU.

I wouldn't mind if anybody does, as long as he processes transaction correctly.

But in order to use any priviledged power, such a big miner would have to run a modified version of the software, and basically the only thing he could do would be to hurt the network by refusing to process incoming transactions or double spending some.  They could not mint arbitrary amounts of bitcoin, for instance.

So it would not have the powers of a central bank.

This is not so.  The function of the Bitcoin network is to be the transaction processing agents (Visa, PayPal, banks) but a central bank does not exist for this function.  The central bank exists to manage a fiat currency, and the management of Bitcoin is in the codebase.  No attack that fails to change a majority of the running codebase of the p2p network has near zero chance of long term success.  All such attacks are either local in scope (double spend, affecting the vendor who is defrauded), limited in time (blockchain fork) or both.  If you can't change the codebase, you can't "manage" the currency, and any changes that you make to the protocol are destroyed after you lose your majority cpu power status.  Which could happen in very short order, as there is an unknown amount of reserve hashing power that could be convinced to come online in defense of the honest network even at a loss.  I am one such person.  If a credible attack of the system were underway, and I was aware of it, I'd be more than willing to hash at a loss.  I'm sure that I'm not alone.

And I don't agree with your perspectives upon the implications of such an attack.  As already stated, hijacking the blockchain as a DOS of the network, would not lead to the destruction of the economy.  Such an attack would have to be maintained for some considerable period of time and against a group of honest participants who all have varying degrees of vested interests to negate such an attack, and who are not generally any more idle than the attackers.

The depth of the attack doesn't seem to sink in fully for you. If it's not hard, anyone with a bit of brains should have proceeded to initiate an attack at this point. When bitcoins are trading for 1.55 USD each, someone should be motivated? Perhaps you should read the paper again.

I can agree that the risks for this system are greater than imagined by those investing heavily at this time. Yet I maintain that people in this community are too concerned about technical attacks such as the 'NSA with supercomputers'. Post after post is made with back-of-the-envelope calculations regarding the amount of CPU power needed to take BitCoin off course. All the while the social aspect is overlooked.

Long before something like that would happen, an opposing government would do what governments do best. They'd make law and sway opinions. That's how the government defeated the gold as a currency and acquired the coveted magic wand of inflation. At no point did they try to invent fake gold, or physically destroy it. They just slowly displaced it, made it 'unpatriotic' not to play along, until fiat money won. In the US in 1933 they even forbade private ownership in larger quantities of gold.

Similarly BitCoin would first be heavily regulated, starting at the points of sale, all the while populist propaganda made such action appear tremendously beneficial to society. Then eventually enough control would be held over not just the network but more importantly the popular merchants that the de facto power over the network would rest with the government. Badcoins, registration requirements and mandatory inflationary systems would follow.

That is how I foresee the end of it. You have not convinced me the technical risks you describe won't be easily countered through coordinated effort of the community vested in preserving the value of the BitCoin. And even if you had me so convinced, I would still fear the imposition of monetary control through legal and social means much more greatly.

Although I agree that social engineering is the greater risk for Bitcoin, I don't agree that governments can do to Bitcoin what it did to hard money.  First, they don't have that kind of time.  Bitcoin is maturing faster then supporters expected, and if it gets anywhere near the mindshare of PayPal, the public would call 'bullshit' on any kind of propaganda that any government agents might produce.  Bitcoin is running on Internet time, governments cannot.

This also isn't 1933, and the public might call 'bullshit' on it anyway; since we all have the truth button only a click away, and the young are inclined to use that button a hundred times a day.  Any mention of the term "Bitcoin" by any government agency or representative might just have the opposite of the intended effect.

Hard to say.  In fact, impossible to say.  But I would guess that you are correct, at present.  As hashing becomes ever more marginal on a straight for-profit basis, and the user base continues to grow, the reserve hashing power will continue to climb.  If there were some way to estimate the number of non-generating nodes, we might be able to take a fair guess at the reserve capacity; but as far as I know, there is no credible way to count non-generating nodes.

Oh, certainly not.  There has been many before you who have come up with variations on the basic 'overpower the network' attack.  None of which have proven to be particularly advantagous.  I encourage you to keep thinking about attacking the network, however, because if one of us can think of a vector of attack before a hostile entity does, we can mitigate such an attack.


How do you know that?


I still think your numbers are off.  How are you coming up with this estimate?  Are you including the ongoing costs of power?  Are you considering the islanding effects of Tor and I2P?  Have you considered possible countermeasures that the Bitcoin network could actively respond with?  Have you considered the possible actions of other governments generally hostile to whatever government happens to be hostile to Bitcoin?

I do wish you would stop pontificating about the weaknesses or flaws of the bitcoin network and either attack it directly or promote something superior. Otherwise you come across as nothing more than an educated troll.

Where do your motives lie sir?

Garnishing about the 50% hashing power is boo-ring and  been covered a thousand time.

You said that whether or not calling a group of attackers a bitcoin "central bank"  was just a matter of semantics and was not relevant.

I could as well argue that calling you a troll is just a matter of semantics too.

If you don't want to be called a troll, don't make such trollish suggestions.


There is a wealth of intelligent people on this forum finding new and interesting ways to trade and promote bitcoin and this is what you come up with?

Lemme understand one thing: Do you picture Bitcoin adopters as stupid in general? If I look at the logic here, you are coming in this forum presenting Bitcoin as inefficient and crippled with gaping security flaws. This implies you think any adopter is at least hasty in decision making and/or poorly informed of the mechanics of this project. You are thus naturally prejudiced against this community.

Your bitter, repetitive comments about Libertarians are proof enough, yet it is interesting that you won't acknowledge the same right to prejudice to the Bitcoin community against your kind of outside contributor even though you use this very prejudice to legitimate your answer to those who contradict you in the threads you participate. Not much for respect, is there?

Have you considered the possibility that as an outsider, you are the one that is less informed, than let's say, founding and early members of this project? Have you also considered that your grasp of the technology used in this project is not at the stellar level you're fancying it? I giggled when you mentioned using a DOS attack on a p2p project...

Lastly, have you considered that suggestions detached from reality, the persistent speculation on Bitcoin's flaws resting on nothing but conjecture is simply tiring the contributors of this thread? What proper discussion can you expect by linking to threads outside this community. How can you expect decent defense of this project's technological choices by discussing it with people that have no involvement nor experience with it? And you label that an adult-minded discussion? And then you're surprised you're called a troll?

Nice one on the French part, you're on spot. The reading comprehension part is funny coming from someone that makes a point of not being rigorous with semantics...

As for attacks on p2p projects, countless failed attempts by commercial firms, backed by the financial power of the movie, music and video gaming industry, to DOS torrent trackers and inject false packets in the last 5 years or so speaks volumes about the counters a p2p network has against such basic attacks, which are nothing more than harassment. There's also quite a history of DOS and other petty attacks on mining pools in this very forum, there is a documented case of forking available too, yet this project doesn't look to me like it's on the brink of extinction.


No I don't, and I said before, since you're making a point of being anonymous, this is idle talk. It also shows you have issues presenting the veracity of your points without resorting to credentials.


Spoken like a true central banking jingoist?


First of all, if an attack is easy to perform, a truly concerned party would present an isolated experiment reproducing it instead of speaking of conjecture. Second, such declarations and the weight they carry gives the right to the contributors of this post to ask about your motives, but somehow you brush those as irrelevant. And lastly, your point isn't realistic. What you are saying is akin to presenting society as fragile because a detractor of said society can walk in the streets shooting people dead for the price of a single gun.

@s

This is an open forum, and you get into a flame war with one member.  And then paint the entire membership with the same wide brush.  If you have something to contribute to the community, please stay.  But if you really are a 10+ year veteran of this field of study, then you should have thicker skin than this.  Your assesment that this forum is dominated by teenaged libertarians is likely correct, but irrelevent.  I was annoyed by that comment, because you used the phrase as an insult, implying that teenagers or libertarians are contemptable in some fashion.  I've known enough of both to know that is not a rational perspective.

I've been following this thread, and have yet to see either of you post any significant personal attack.  If Goatpig annoys you, ignore him.

but but, he called me French ='(

Even your smiley makes me think of a mime.

If someone makes Bitcoin unusable for a long time by controlling >50% of the network, people might start weighting the "work" value of a chain by looking at its behavior in handling transactions. A chain of 20 blocks with no transactions is very likely to be malicious, for example. As long as it's done by weighting instead of outright rejection, legitimate clients shouldn't ever stay on separate chains for long.

I think there's too much fuss about nothing. Tiny technical details that have close to no real life values are discussed to a dead end. If bitcoin was a person, I'd wonder what it ever did to Timothy B Lee to make him write so much negative about it. It's almost like he wishes it to fail, and his articles always lacks technical details and real scientific proof. Don't know why everybody gives him attention at all.

The economists had their chance and screwed everyone over. Now its the hackers turn.