I dunno, I think this paper makes tons of sense and is an important
kind of analysis.

The whole point of Bitcoin is to set up an incentive structure where
an individual's self-centered incentives are aligned with the desired
global structure. If incentives weren't important, there'd be no need
for a reward lottery at all, and we could just build everything on top
of Bitmessage. It's a virtue of a system design to tolerate (and
leverage) short-sighted greedy behavior, even if it's not a virtue of
an individual to be short-sighted.

Bitcoin seems to work because it is at least somewhat
incentive-compatible. We have yet to see the development of
"RationalMiner" bitcoin software that deviates from the basic behavior
of bitcoind, but Bitcoin is also barely mainstream yet, so it would be
wise to expect that this sort of thing is coming.

This paper points out a way in which the protocol is not quite
incentive compatible, and suggests a *very* simple change to the
(currently unspecified) miner behavior to mitigate it.

FWIW I also wrote a little while ago about similar sort of thing, but
it's a different idea:
https://gist.github.com/amiller/cf9af3fbc23a629d3084

tl;dr: If there are ways in which selfish/greedy behavior deviates
from honest, then we should identify them, and, if possible, fix them.
As an individual, cooperate; as a protocol designer, anticipate that
everyone else is selfish.


On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 4:32 PM, Amir Taaki <genjix@???> wrote:
> 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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--
Andrew Miller