But if the network is entierely built upon selfish interest, you cant complain in the same breath that miner act selfish and steal your money because it's profitable to them, or miner empty block for the same raeson. Perfectly acceptable behavior then. Nothing more to expect from any conscious being.
That is exactly what I expect of a decentralized, trustless system: a web of greedy cheating bastards wanting to rip off one another so much that they can only come to the consensus of a working, fair system ; and in fact, of any form of society in general (which, at its most abstract level, IS a trustless, decentralized system, governed by the immutable and non-centralized laws of physics). I think any picturing of anything else but that is but delusion, with the purpose to misguide the preys at best, and based upon misunderstanding at worst.
It's what I call the sociopathic/paranoiac theory, that no one can be trusted, everyone is the enmy, and you are on your own against everyone else.
The essence of life, in my idea. Only, you cannot live like that, so you are forced to gamble, and place your trust in not-to-be-trusted entities, and the only thing you can hope for, is that that not-to-be-trusted entity is just as much obliged to trust you than you are obliged to trust him, and the complex interlock of threats makes that you do not dare to scam him because of the house of cards of false mutual trust relations that it could let crumble. This has the emergent apparent effect that it seems that you really can trust people, while in fact you can't, but you are tied together in mutual fear of the consequences of scamming the other one. If this web of mutual threats is thick enough, your only choice is to behave honestly until you have not much to lose any more, at which point you also cannot harm much any more. This web of mutual fear is what keeps together "relations of trust" other than those inspired by true empathy (close family and friends for instance although even there nothing is sure).
The essence of social relationships consist in obtaining more of this fake trust (that is, fear of the consequences of not behaving trustworthy) from others, than you have to be submitted to having to be honest to others. This asymmetry determines your power over others, and hence the unfairness by which you can obtain value from them. Playing this game is the essence of life at large and the engine that brings untrustworthy entities to power and propagates their offspring.
And this idea that the network is populated only by greedy cheating bastards and that it's only the good cop software that keep everything in check, is really overrated.
When you look at how pooled mining work, it's even very unlikely most miner even check the validity of transaction and merkkle root and that it actually match the block headers template.
Miners sell hash rate to pools against money. I don't think they care what the pool does with their hashes. They don't even need to be paid in the coin the pool makes with their hash power ; but usually the pool does this to hedge against coin value fluctuations. But miners could rent their hash computations for fiat to pools if that suited people, too. Miners play "amazon" for pools. They put computing hardware at disposal against a price.
Where I want to get at is that the level of security that is actually provided by the network in term of trustlessness and decentralisation is very overrated.
I know ! But most people are simply *not capable* technically to cheat on that system, and are also kept in this mutual fear of cheating relationship. On the internet, nobody knowns you are a dog, but if you piss off one or other maffioso, he'll find you. So probably technically, most people don't know how ; and those that know how, mostly don't dare ; and those that know and dare, have stuff at stake.
It's well known bitcoin works if 51% of node are honest.
No. If not 51% of nodes COLLUDE to be dishonest IN THE SAME WAY. As there is only one way to be honest, and there are 100 ways to be dishonest, the dispersion of the dishonest systems makes that they can only settle on being honest, after all, because otherwise, they get nowhere.