Why Bitcoin mining?
It is generally accepted that latency in block propagation is one of the bottlenecks for Bitcoin scaling. This is why many of Bitcoin’s most active developers and researchers have presented a series of solutions to compress blocks and speed up propagation over the past years.
It is not as well known that these solutions may not suffice on their own. Due to a practice called “spy mining” or “pool-watcher mining, ” Bitcoin mining has increasingly come to rely on the data and network infrastructure provided by mining pools.
As a result, many mining pools are not necessarily incentivized to broadcast their blocks to the network as fast as they can — regardless of latency in block propagation.
Selfish mining
In short, selfish mining is a type of attack where miners find new blocks, but do not immediately broadcast these blocks to the network. The miners do, however, mine on top of any new found block they find themselves: they are mining “selfishly.” This gives them a head start to find the next block, while all other competitors are wasting their resources mining on top of an older block.
But hiding a new block is also risky. While a selfish miner hides a block, competitors may find a competing block. If this competing block makes its way through the network before the selfish miner’s block does, the selfish miner would have wasted its own resources by hiding the block: the block is now worthless.
For selfish mining to be profitable, therefore, the attacker requires a significant amount of hash power on the network — some 25 to 30 percent at least. And more than half of all hash power on the network is surely enough. Though, with a majority of hash power, the attack perhaps starts to resemble a 51 percent attack and not just a selfish mining attack.
A “selfish 51-percent attack, ” if you will.
Luckily, no miner (or mining pool) currently controls over half of all hash power on the Bitcoin network, or even 25 percent. At least not directly...
Validationless Mining
A lot of miners do engage in a type of “validationless mining” or (less accurately termed) “SPV mining."
A Bitcoin block consists of several pieces of data: transactions, a timestamp, a nonce and more. One important piece of data is a reference to the previous block: the block header hash. The block header hash can only be generated using the block header of the previous block, which can in turn only be generated using all data in that block. The idea is that a miner cannot mine a new block before it has seen the previous block.
But there is a bit of a loophole. Using only the block header hash, miners can try and find the next block just as well — even without knowing the previous block header, nor any of the other data in the previous block.
This can potentially come in handy. If miners can get a block header hash before receiving an actual block, they can try and find a new block more quickly, which allows them to be more profitable.
