Researchers are claiming a fundamental flaw in bitcoin which leaves this 2 billion dollar currency vulnerable to take over, yet we're still going up,
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-24818975some one make sense to me?
As this doesn;t make sense?
SUrely panic selling should happen, unless theirs market manipulation
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Academics Ittay Eyal and Emin Gun Sirer say this group could stay ahead of the competition, which would be stuck solving cryptographical challenges that have already yielded bitcoins, losing time, effort and money.
“The key insight behind the selfish mining strategy is to force the honest miners into performing wasted computations on the stale public [blockchain] branch. Specifically, selfish mining forces the honest miners to spend their cycles on blocks that are destined to not be part of the blockchain,” explained the researchers.
In time, rational miners would prefer to join the selfish miners in order to maximise their profits, and the selfish group would increase its influence until it becomes a majority. At this point, Bitcoin would stop being decentralised, losing one of its most attractive properties. Control by a single entity could even lead to the complete collapse of the digital currency.
Researchers say that selfish mining is feasible for any group size of colluding miners, as long as they have enough hardware at their disposal. Indeed groups capable of such projects already exist.
Eyal and Sirer propose a modification to the Bitcoin protocol that protects against selfish mining pools that command less than a quarter of the overall mining resources. But they say that the virual currency will never be completely safe against this type of attack.
