Hi,
This is the original thread:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324413.0This it the other thread that was a spinoff:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=327292.0What good would that do? It would cost a lot of processing power and there would be little profit. There would be N times the amount of processing power in order to flood the network with their blocks, but each one different. With that much processing power, it would be more effective and more profitable to mine normally. Instead of finding two blocks simultaneously and getting only a 25 BTC reward, with the same hashrate, they could find two blocks one after each other and get a 50 BTC reward.
The only difference I was looking at was what the impact on the rest of the network of miner is.
The rest of the network would be more likely to be working on blocks on one of the chains that the selfish pool has a headstart on.
At the sametime, the total processing power of the selfish pool is effectively hidden, so there wouldn't be an update
in the adjustment of difficulty for the hashrate.
This is a theoretical question only, perhaps it shows that the original paper is invalid by extrapolation, I don't know.
The longer a node holds onto a block, the higher the risk of someone else finding that same block and thus orphaning the miner. Unless the miner held a significant portion of the network, he will not be able to mine faster than the rest of the network can and produce a longer chain. Still, the miner that finds a block has a slight advantage over the remaining miners since he has the block before everyone else. Due to network latency and the verification of blocks, the miner who found a block has a slight time advantage over everyone else, but not by much.
Yes, this is the advantage I was thinking of. My thought is that all miners ought to do this, at least periodically.
It seems like a way to increase the CPU (or ASIC) utilization by having a slight headstart on the next block.
It is a gamble that might give a slight increase in payoff against the amount of availabe processing power.
It doesn't seem to have any negative effect on the behavior of the network of miners in general.
With respect to the paper on this practice, I don't see how it draws the conclusion that this will create a mining monopoly.
There is no requirement that there is only a single pool that would do this type of holdback, assuming it works.
Regards,
David