Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] BIP proposal - patch to raise selfish mining threshold.

From: Jameson Lopp <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 05 Nov 2013 14:33:14 -0500

The conversations that spawned from this paper have been fascinating to 
read, but I have a problem with the conclusions. To quote the paper:

"The Bitcoin ecosystem is open to manipulation, and potential takeover, 
by miners seeking to maximize their rewards. This paper presented 
Selfish-Mine, a mining strategy that enables pools of colluding miners
that adopt it to earn revenues in excess of their mining power. Higher 
revenues can lead new rational miners to join selsh miner pools, 
leading to a collapse of the decentralized currency."

Please explain to me why any rational miner would collude to earn 
slightly higher short term profits at the expense of then wiping out the 
value of all their bitcoins in the long term.

Also, if you felt that this vulnerability is an immediate danger to the 
Bitcoin network, why publish the vulnerability publicly rather than 
first disclosing it privately to the core developers? Apologies if you 
did disclose it privately in the past; I've seen no mention of it.
--
Jameson Lopp
Software Engineer
Bronto Software

On 11/05/2013 01:58 PM, Jeff Garzik wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 5, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Alessandro Parisi <[email-masked]> wrote:
>> this means that anytime a bug is found in Bitcoin protocol, chances are that
>> it would take a lot more time to get fixed
>
> Correct.  There is significant potential that a fix can create other
> problems...   and any major mistake could instantly destroy > $2
> billion worth of value.
>