......
and I'm also baffled that "withholding winning blocks" is even a thing. Is there a way to defend against that in code?
Yes, Eleuthria and WK/Luke-Jr have implemented checks that alert them when there is a suspicious miner.
But this is only detection, not prevention. So a game of cat and mouse will ensue, in which they create new users and try to get away with it for as long as they can.
Agreed, this isn't prevention. Not sure how the system would send a suspicious miner a solvable block (unless already received and immediately sending to all suspect parties).
@countduckula: Brewer's yeast has a similar take on success. Given a limitless amount of sugar, It eats it and multiplies as fast as it can...
...while shitting ethanol, which inevitably kills it, giving us delicious booze.
I hope the Bitcoin community is smarter than yeast.
As a brewer I will confirm. Also Booze as grnbrg said.
I would have hoped in the self governing world that is BTC it would have remained altruistic enough to stop this sort of thing happening but I can see the allure to "more coins same effort" which appears to the case.
In brewers terms "cut malts add sugars same ABV = Profit."
When the reward becomes small enough I think a lot of the big "investors" will probably pull out. We just have to survive that long, lol.
I will probably continue to mine forever as it is part of the distribution of the chain.