What you describe is an example of a majority attack ("51% attack"). No
technical mechanism in Bitcoin prevents this. However in practice, miners
are not incentivized to perform this attack as it would destroy confidence
in Bitcoin, and would ultimately impact their revenues.-Marc On Mon, Nov 6, 2017, 22:32 Robert Taylor via bitcoin-dev < bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org> wrote: > Forgive me if this has been asked elsewhere before, but I am trying to > understand a potential failure mode of Bitcoin mining. > > A majority of miners can decide which valid blocks extend the chain. But > what would happen if a majority of miners, in the form of a cartel decided > to validly orphan any blocks made by miners outside of their group? For > example, they could soft fork a new rule where the block number is signed > by set of keys known only to the cartel, and that signature placed in the > coinbase. Miners outside of the cartel would not be able to extend the > chain. > > It would be immediately obvious but still valid under the consensus rules. > What are the disincentives for such behavior and what countermeasures could > be done to stop it and ensure mining remained permissionless? I think this > is a valid concern because while it may not be feasible for one actor to > gain a majority of hash alone, it is certainly possible with collusion. > > Robert > _______________________________________________ > bitcoin-dev mailing list > bitcoin-dev@lists.linuxfoundation.org > https://lists.linuxfoundation.org/mailman/listinfo/bitcoin-dev >
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