Currently, any pool can employ Selfish-Mine and start a mudslide. Eyal and Sirer suggest a practical fix of the protocol that would prevent pools smaller than 1/4th of the system from employing Selfish-Mine. They warn, however, than pools this large do exist today (for benign reasons), and they should be dismantled for the system to be immune to selfish mining.
This result implies a new bound, requiring 3/4 of the miners to be honest. This bound is significantly higher than the wrongly-believed 1/2. The authors believe, though, that “the Bitcoin ecosystem is strong enough to maintain such a large majority of honest miners”. The question is – can the miners operating today adopt the suggested fix and dismantle too-large pools before a selfish mining pool arises?
just passing this along, someone sent me this today. Paper is published on Arxiv.
http://www.newswise.com/articles/bitcoin-open-to-takeover-researchers-discover-with-new-algorithm
