A new mining strategy has been discovered in which 'selfish' miners can benefit at the detriment of others.
Heres the research paper from the boffins at Cornell University
http://arxiv.org/pdf/1311.0243v2.pdf My opinion is that the proposed 'solution', a modification to the way bitcoin works,
would be suicide. I've written more on my blog here about why I think that but in short, they propose to make it so that only big mining pools can 'cheat' instead of everyone. No more level playing field for mining pools.
This gives incentive to everyone to join a big mining pool in order to reap the benefits of the selfish mining strategy. In other words the patch, far from helping things would almost guarantee centralised control to appear in short notice.
The alternative is that everyone can mine 'selfishly' if they choose to opening up interesting possibilities but hopefully allowing the network to remain decentralised.
Hoping to get some conversation on the topic here.
Thanks
http://afbitcoins.wordpress.com/2013/11/05/selfish-mining-possibilities-discovered/