Nice paraphrasing with words I never said.


Yeah you're right about that. If miners knowingly include transactions inside a smaller chain when they are aware of a larger chain that exists, that is a perfect example of fraud against users (and also, buggy mining software that should be repaired ASAP) but from a metaphorical perspective to conventional fraud, in this case the fraud will also hurt the miners who will lose large sums of block reward BTC from submitting blocks to a shorter chain.

Because of the amount of money at stake and how difficult mining became, this is why you don't see miners pull of this kind of fraud. It would take a really dumb mining organization to risk millions of $$$ in block rewards just to play with people's transactions.

But normally the reason why a lot of temporary chain splits happen is because two miners who are far from each other on the peer graph find a block, broadcast it to their peers who are also far enough from the other set of peers such that they can't talk to each other quickly, and then one of the miners that are in these groups of peers finds a third block and extends one of the competing changes.

Since this type of occurrence can't be known in advance and is corrected by the network quickly, in no more than several minutes, it can't be described as fraud though. In this case, there's nothing a miner can do to prevent this kind of situation from happening except to connect to all the nodes which are attached to other miners. Whereas fraud is something that happens intentionally, as you said, not accidentally.