Yeah seemed fanciful to me too if you're all talking about that non
majority evil miner cooperative attack. Why don't we form a cooperative to
rob brute force brain wallets? ... anyone? Yeah didn't think so. Isn't
that an economic attack too?

> 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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>>>
>>>
>>
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