Wouldn't this be cancelled out by the chance that another miner could
"non-selfishly" mine two blocks by themselves?

Even if selfish miners accounted for more than 50% of the hash power,
everyone else would end up becoming selfish to compete and then it would
equal out among the miners. There would be more orphans created and more
hash power wasted. But blocks would still be created and transactions would
still be confirmed.

Maybe I haven't thought about this enough though.

I see an evil entity/entities gaining a large amount of hash power and only
mining blocks with the coinbase transaction in, preventing tx being
confirmed as being a more serious threat.

Along with miners trying to fight among themselves confirming a transaction
which has a large fee, such as the many 100-200btc fees paid in
transactions due to errors made by a user, events like this could cause a
massive blockchain fork, with each miner trying to build the longest chain
on their own fork. The FBI is currently sat of massive amounts of btc which
they could use in this way. I think it may be right to introduce a max fee
option along side min fee, where nodes can refuse to relay a transaction if
it looks like too many fees were paid, possibly by accident and it could
cause a fork.


There will be a point soon when the majority of miners act "intelligently",
rather than just mining whatever bitcoind tells them to. Too much
disruption like this could cause the exchange rate to collapse, or trust in
the systems ability to confirm transactions dropping.

Thanks
Bob




On 4 November 2013 18:32, Adam B. Levine <adam@???> wrote:

> So crazy idea,
> is it unethical to intentionally test this out on a low volume altcoin,
> document and release the results? Seems like it would be trivial to pull
> this off with anything outside the top 30 cryptos, and in a real world lab
> we could test away the hypotheticals.
>
> Adam B. Levine
> Editor-in-Chief
> Let's Talk Bitcoin! <http://www.letstalkbitcoin.com>
> 1-855-WETALKBITCOIN Ex.700
> [image: Inline image 2]
> Talk to me on Gli.ph, my preferred communications platform
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 10:25 AM, Peter Todd <pete@???> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Nov 04, 2013 at 07:22:45PM +0100, Pieter Hintjens wrote:
>> > http://hackingdistributed.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-is-broken/
>>
>> They're right, but there's an easy fix that happens to have other
>> advantages like reducing the work wasted on orphans and making it
>> possible to get quick feedback on whether or not your transactions are
>> being mined:
>>
>>
>> http://www.mail-archive.com/bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net/msg03137.html
>>
>> --
>> 'peter'[:-1]@petertodd.org
>> 00000000000000041b6435c26187eeb950e1f3a0127e2776e82ece2d3c44854c
>>
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