As I understand, selfish mining is an attack where miners collude to mine at a lower hashrate then with all miners working independently. What are the current strategies used to prevent this and what are the future plans?
One idea I have is to let the block reward get "modulated" according to peak hashrate. Say p is the peak hashrate for 365 periods (1 year) consisting of 144 blocks, h is the hashrate of the last 144 block (1 day) period, and r is the base subsidy (12.5 BTC currently). You can then make the max block reward 0.5 r (1 + h/p). So if hashrate is at peak you get the full reward. Otherwise you get less, down to a min of 0.5 r. If miners were to collude to mine at a lower than peak hashrate, then they may be able to do it profitably for 144 blocks, but after that, the reward would get modulated and it wouldn't be so much in their interest to continue mining at the lower hashrate. What flaws are there with this? I know it could be controversial due to easier mining present for early miners, so maybe it would have to be done in combination with a new more dynamic difficulty adjustment algorithm. But I don't see how hashrate can continue rising indefinitely, so a solution should be made for selfish mining. Also when subsidies stop and a fee market is needed, I guess a portion of the fees can be withheld for later if hashrate is not at peak. -- PGP: B6AC 822C 451D 6304 6A28 49E9 7DB7 011C D53B 5647 _______________________________________________ bitcoin-dev mailing list bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev