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November 05, 2013, 04:18:15 AM |
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Haven't read everything yet, but here's a remark already:
« We assume that miners are rational; that is, they try to maximize their revenue, and may deviate from the protocol to do so. »
If they want to maximize their revenue, they may prefer not to attack the system, since it may compromise the whole bitcoin system, and thus the value of bitcoins. I'm not sure the author took this into account.
PS.
« Selfish miners achieve this goal by selectively revealing their mined blocks to invalidate the honest miners’ work. Approximately speaking, the selfish mining pool keeps its mined blocks private, secretly bifurcating the blockchain and cre- ating a private branch. Meanwhile, the honest miners continue mining on the shorter, public branch. Because the selfish miners command a relatively small portion of the total mining power, their private branch will not remain ahead of the public branch indefinitely. Consequently, selfish mining judiciously reveals blocks from the private branch to the public, such that the honest miners will switch to the recently revealed blocks, abandoning the shorter public branch. This renders their previous effort spent on the shorter public branch wasted, and enables the selfish pool to collect higher revenues by incorporating a higher fraction of its blocks into the blockchain. »
So that's basically offline mining. Hasn't this been discussed many times already? Anyway I don't see why an offline chain would be longer than the online chain, unless the offline miners have more processing power. The author seems to do very complicated maths to explain this. Haven't read it yet.
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