Quote from: Brangdon on February 18, 2014, 07:54:07 PM

Quote from: DeathAndTaxes on February 17, 2014, 09:52:20 PM

On a long enough timeline I think "fraudulent" miners are all but an inevitability. I could see an entity with say 20% of the network willing to accept out of band double spends for a hefty fee (either flat rate say $10 per tx, or a % of the tx amount).

Do you not think large retailers might mitigate that risk by becoming miners themselves? If Bitcoin succeeds, I would expect many entities to be willing to devote some resources to mining, to make it harder for others to control a sizeable fraction of the network. With that goal, they don't need to make a profit, although any mining income will help defray the costs.

The issue isn't that all miners would be fraudulent but rather a small % would. I certainly do think merchants may organize to better control tx processing but that doesn't eliminate the risk of a fraudulent miner. Depending on the risk profile and the profit margin 0-confirm may simply not be viable for all merchants in all situations because the chance of a fraudulent miner intentionally including the double spend in the next block can never be guaranteed to be 0% and merchants running a transaction processing pool can't make that 0% either.