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Date: Mon, 6 Oct 2014 01:54:38 +0200
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From: =?UTF-8?B?Sm9yZ2UgVGltw7Nu?= <jtimon@blockstream.io>
To: Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com>
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Cc: Bitcoin Development <bitcoin-development@lists.sourceforge.net>
Subject: Re: [Bitcoin-development] The Bitcoin Freeze on Transaction Attack
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On Mon, Oct 6, 2014 at 1:40 AM, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell@gmail.com> wrote:
> Something you might want to try to formalize in your analysis is the
> proportion of the network which is "rational" vs
> "honest"/"altruistic".  Intuitively, if there is a significant amount
> of honest hashrate which is refusing to aid the greedy behavior even
> at a potential loss to themselves this strategy becomes a loser even
> for the purely greedy participants. It would be interesting to
> characterize the income tradeoffs for different amounts of altruism,
> or whatever convergence problems an attempt by altruistic
> participaints to punish the forkers might create.

Not only that, greedy miners may actually have an incentive to just
follow the longest chain. Say I'm a small miner and I know that the
chances of re-mining the high tx and getting that block into the
longest chain are minimal or null. Then I will probably prefer to just
mine on top of the longest chain.
So "If everyone acts rationally in his own interest, then the best
choice for the remaining miners is to try to mine a competing block at
the same height n including the high-fee transaction, to collect the
fee for themselves" is not necessarily true.
p * 50 can be lower than q * 25 if p < 2*q. P and q depend on what
everyone is doing, not just you.

In any case, it is interesting to think about this things since mining
subsidies will eventually disappear and then transaction fees will
ALWAYS be higher than subsidies.