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Selfish Mining

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What Is Selfish Mining?

Selfish mining is a strategic attack in which a miner or a group of miners secretly mine a private chain and release blocks strategically to gain a competitive advantage. Described in a 2013 paper by Cornell researchers, this method allows attackers to increase their rewards by withholding blocks and strategically revealing them to invalidate others' blocks, leading to resource waste and the potential centralization of mining power.

How Selfish Mining Works

Block Withholding: Miners create a private branch of the blockchain by delaying the broadcast of new blocks.

Revealing Blocks: The private chain is disclosed when it surpasses the public chain in length, causing the public chain's blocks to be discarded.

Resource Wastage: Other miners expend resources on invalidated blocks, resulting in lost rewards and computational efforts.

Key Considerations

Hashing Power: The success of selfish mining depends significantly on the attacker's hashing power.

Network Impact: While potentially profitable, selfish mining undermines the decentralization of Bitcoin, leading to the concentration of power in fewer hands.

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