Selfish Mining

[Nefelibato]

I have been reading about selfish mining and I have some doubts, since the information is very scattered. What percentage of computing power is required? Is there any way to detect it? What would happen if all miners were selfish miners?

[garlonicon]

What percentage of computing power is required?

Any percentage is accepted, because if you mine a block with coinbase transaction and nothing else, it will be valid.

Is there any way to detect it?

Yes, it will be clearly visible, that your block will include only your coinbase transaction, and nothing else.

What would happen if all miners were selfish miners?

Then, on-chain transactions will stay unconfirmed. But also note that basic block rewards are decreased with each halving, so finally the network will reach a state, where selfish mining will result in zero satoshis, collected by such miners, because then transaction fees will determine, how many coins they will get.

[HmmMAA]

Yes, it will be clearly visible, that your block will include only your coinbase transaction, and nothing else.

I don't think that selfish mining has to do necessarily with empty blocks . It certainly increases the chance of finding faster a block than other pools that include transactions as you have a slight avantage of time .

[BitMaxz]

I never heard about selfish mining but after a bit of research on selfish mining it looks like they mine coins but they get more rewards by keep holding the blocks secretly.
And according to my research that selfish mining is a form of attack on the Bitcoin network because it can cause the network to become less secure and less reliable.

If you are planning to do that on Bitcoin you will need a machine called ASIC miner that supports SHA256 algo and based on my research detecting or finding someone who do selfish mining can be difficult. But here are a few signs that someone do selfish mining.

High hashrate: Selfish miners will often have a significantly higher hashrate than other miners on the network. This can be detected by looking at the distribution of hashrate across the network.

Consistent block generation: Selfish mining involves withholding blocks from the network until a selfish miner can generate two blocks in a row, giving them an advantage in the mining race. This can be detected by looking for consistent block generation from a single miner or mining pool.

Abnormal block propagation: Selfish mining involves delaying the propagation of blocks to other miners on the network. This can be detected by monitoring the time it takes for blocks to propagate across the network.

Inconsistent mining patterns: Selfish mining involves modifying mining strategies in response to the behavior of other miners. This can be detected by monitoring mining patterns and looking for inconsistencies or sudden changes.

Source: Can't put the source because the website already dead a long time ago but still can be seen through Google using the keyword "4 signs someone does selfish bitcoin mining"

[tromp]

I have been reading about selfish mining and I have some doubts, since the information is very scattered. What percentage of computing power is required? Is there any way to detect it? What would happen if all miners were selfish miners?

Investopedia [1] explains Selfish Mining as

"Selfish mining is a deceitful cryptocurrency mining strategy in which one miner or a group solves a hash, opens a new block, and withholds it from the public blockchain. This action creates a fork, which is then mined to get ahead of the public blockchain."

It's not about mining empty blocks (why would you call not taking any fees selfish?).
 
The original 2018 paper on selfish mining is "Majority is not enough: bitcoin mining is vulnerable" [2] by Eyal and Gün Sirer, whose Abstract reads:

"The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom asserts that the mining protocol is incentive-compatible and secure against colluding minority groups, that is, it incentivizes miners to follow the protocol as prescribed.

We show that the Bitcoin mining protocol is not incentive-compatible. We present an attack with which colluding miners' revenue is larger than their fair share. The attack can have significant consequences for Bitcoin: Rational miners will prefer to join the attackers, and the colluding group will increase in size until it becomes a majority. At this point, the Bitcoin system ceases to be a decentralized currency.

Unless certain assumptions are made, selfish mining may be feasible for any coalition size of colluding miners. We propose a practical modification to the Bitcoin protocol that protects Bitcoin in the general case. It prohibits selfish mining by a coalition that command less than 1/4 of the resources. This threshold is lower than the wrongly assumed 1/2 bound, but better than the current reality where a coalition of any size can compromise the system."

More recent papers on selfish mining include"Effective Selfish Mining Defense Strategies to Improve Bitcoin Dependability" [3] and "Rethinking selfish mining under pooled mining" [4].

[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/s/selfish-mining.asp
[2] https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3212998
[3] https://www.mdpi.com/2076-3417/13/1/422
[4] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2405959522000443#b4