Hi guys,

It is NOT true that the attacker cannot benefit from such an attack!

In our paper published 6 months ago we explain how to make block withholding attacks PROFITABLE.
It is very very simple and gains can be quite substantial in practice, see:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1402.1718

These data were also totally BOGUS and INCORRECT from the start!

Cf. Section 2.5 in http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0534

NONSENSE, everybody knows it is MUCH lower, maybe 50M as claimed in this forum, and was maybe 68 M in April [Fitch rating agency press release].

Now it is easy to see that in current bitcoin it is IMPOSSIBLE to estimate accurately the transaction volume. There is just no way to know the accurate volume, not even in theory.

In Section 2.5 of our paper http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0534
we explain why exactly it is so:

A particular problem are the actions of some bitcoin addresses which hold very large balances
and return change to themselves at new freshly created addresses.

This is work in progress. Thank you all for extremely valuable comments.
The most up to date version of this paper is available at:
http://arxiv.org/abs/1405.0534