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November 04, 2013, 08:45:38 PM

walsoraj and bears, now you have grounds to predict an imminent crash:


Bitcoin Researchers: You Can Game the System

http://mashable.com/2013/11/04/bitcoin-cornell-researchers/



Selfish miners gonna kill bitcoin , In USD we trust  Wink


How is it that they have no requirement to understand anything in the university concerning the topic they are researching...?

I was wondering if what they said was even possible. I never heard of hiding found blocks and the like.

Quote
While all miners work from the most recently discovered block (think of it as the "original" block), the selfish mining process begins when a pool of miners discovers a new block and doesn't publish it. The selfish pool then begins working on discovering yet another block, mining from this hidden one. Meanwhile, the rest of the "honest" miners are still wasting resources mining from the original block.

Can you mine FROM a "hidden" block? This makes no sense to me.

Yes you can mine on any block created.

But this only makes sense if the pool has 51% of the hash rate, otherwise the public chain will statistically grow longer.

This is also why you wait at least 6 confirmations to consider a transaction valid. A sub 50% pool can statistically mine on an alternate hidden chain for a few blocks from time to time.

In practice no one has done this because it is wasting your mining power and revenue. ...