Quote from: Come-from-Beyond on May 13, 2016, 10:57:15 AM

Quote from: smooth on May 13, 2016, 09:09:00 AM

That paper does not demonstrate any party is necessarily operating out of a Nash equilibrium. Selfish mining is detectable, so mining pools, being visible and identifiable entities, face reputational costs for engaging in it. That very plausibly makes it unprofitable. Also, some forms rely on network conditions that may not exist.

If there were some sort of undetectable or unattributable selfish mining known to be compatible with the current network conditions, and we could tell that weren't happening then you could correctly make the argument you did, but that is a contradiction.

I guess one time we might see a valid experiment would if a big pool does an exit scam. Under the reputational-cost theory, such a pool should selfish mine right before the exit, though it still might not be worth the trouble to actually implement for relatively modest gains.

We had Deepbit which got 51% of hashing power and noone detected an abuse attempt. We had GHash.io which got 51% of hashing power and an abuse attempt was detected.

What did keep Deepbit operator honest (they are Russians BTW, half of BTT thinks Russian = con-artist)?
How much reputation did that doublespending against a casino cost to GHash.io operator?

r0ach = Half of BTT? Well maybe there are lot of sock puppets on here, lol.

Anyway, I don't think you can easily answer "how much reputation" cost, but you can't say that failure to take short term advantage is not a Nash equilibrium when reputational costs exist, because that is an alternate consistent explanation.