Quote from: Come-from-Beyond on May 13, 2016, 11:21:08 AM

Quote from: smooth on May 13, 2016, 11:10:44 AM

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.

Miners can be anonymous, they can collude, frankly saying, this "reputation" topic doesn't look as a solid counterargument against the claim that Bitcoin operates out of an equilibrium.

Miners can not operate anonymously nor do anything useful with selfish mining or double spends as long as they are mining on pools, which the huge majority of the hash rate is currently doing. Only the pools themselves could do that, and they aren't anonymous.

If a large anonymous solo miners existed and had the opportunity to engage in selfish mining but didn't, your theory would be validated, but how could this ever be tested? I think it is impossible.

You could argue that a bunch of large miners would be better off on private pools or something, and by choosing to use public pools they are not in a Nash equilibrium, but the whole argument becomes complex, since pools benefit when other miners join them, so there is an incentive to be public, large visible actors such as Bitmain might be better off using a visible public pool since it isolates them from false accusations of misconduct, etc.

Also, the theory of selfish mining has some repeated game problems, since it assumes everyone else doesn't selfish mine. If others selfish mine, the defense is to selfish mine yourself, and if multiple large miners of equal size all selfish mine, then it is obvious none retains any advantage. If there are several large miners (or pools), they may be better off not bothering to start the conflict, especially given even small potential for reputational consequences.