Hello everyone,
I am slowly learning the bitcoin technology and thought about an attack I never read anywhere yet.
A team of miners decides to collectively increase their chance of mining new blocks. This team can be one miner by the way.
This is how they would proceed: When one of them mine a new block it is sent to its teammates first so they can start working on the next block. It is sent a little later (n0 seconds)to the rest of the network. There's a risk of losing the new mined block (and the reward) and they will lose some most likely trying to launch this attack, but this is a calculated risk: if it works (=the block is put on the long term chain) then all the teammates miners will have a small advantage because they started to work on the next block before the others. If the next mined block is again mined by a team member then it is sent to the teammates (n0+n1)seconds before it is sent to the rest of the network. The chance for the team to mined the new block can increase at each step and when lucky enough they can mine a sequence of blocks in the chain (with a huge payoff)
For this strategy to be statistically possible there are few parameters to take into account: the hash power of the team relative to the rest of the miners and the time they decide to wait n0, n1, n2 ...etc as a fraction of the average time.
Unless the team possesses a non negligeable part of the whole hasing power this attack is statistically impossible!
But a team could "hide" its hashing power and suddenly do this attack. For example, they have new hashing power and they decide all together to mine at the same time. It would be noticeable by the network only when they have already succeed several times to mine blocks and so then the attack would have a chance.
An other parameter I didn't take into account is the delay of communications in the network. If the ratio of time delay over average block time increases then not only it gives a time advantage on the attacker (obviously) but most importantly it increases the proabability of forks. Forks will greatly help such an attack because it divides the miners hashing power, the attackers team compete against smaller group of miners and can impose their fork at the end (winning the jackpot).
I hope it's clear as I might use phony vocabulary for you guys.
As it been discussed before? any readings? ideas?
thanks for your time
I am slowly learning the bitcoin technology and thought about an attack I never read anywhere yet.
A team of miners decides to collectively increase their chance of mining new blocks. This team can be one miner by the way.
This is how they would proceed: When one of them mine a new block it is sent to its teammates first so they can start working on the next block. It is sent a little later (n0 seconds)to the rest of the network. There's a risk of losing the new mined block (and the reward) and they will lose some most likely trying to launch this attack, but this is a calculated risk: if it works (=the block is put on the long term chain) then all the teammates miners will have a small advantage because they started to work on the next block before the others. If the next mined block is again mined by a team member then it is sent to the teammates (n0+n1)seconds before it is sent to the rest of the network. The chance for the team to mined the new block can increase at each step and when lucky enough they can mine a sequence of blocks in the chain (with a huge payoff)
For this strategy to be statistically possible there are few parameters to take into account: the hash power of the team relative to the rest of the miners and the time they decide to wait n0, n1, n2 ...etc as a fraction of the average time.
Unless the team possesses a non negligeable part of the whole hasing power this attack is statistically impossible!
But a team could "hide" its hashing power and suddenly do this attack. For example, they have new hashing power and they decide all together to mine at the same time. It would be noticeable by the network only when they have already succeed several times to mine blocks and so then the attack would have a chance.
An other parameter I didn't take into account is the delay of communications in the network. If the ratio of time delay over average block time increases then not only it gives a time advantage on the attacker (obviously) but most importantly it increases the proabability of forks. Forks will greatly help such an attack because it divides the miners hashing power, the attackers team compete against smaller group of miners and can impose their fork at the end (winning the jackpot).
I hope it's clear as I might use phony vocabulary for you guys.
As it been discussed before? any readings? ideas?
thanks for your time
It is a bit similar to selfish mining. Although all things mentioned here are accurate I would suggest you read the original paper presenting the selfish mining attack (https://www.cs.cornell.edu/~ie53/publications/btcProcFC.pdf). It is a great resource. Hope it finds you well!
