But if someone with unlimited money (a country like USA or China) wanted to attack the network by paying the miners to mine empty blocks indefinitely, they could effectively stop the network since they are currently so few pools. And their resources are drastically higher than the fees and reward the miners receive from the network. Is that not true?
Discussion
Hypothetically, would the US government pay miners in China to mine empty blocks?
If we assume that a pool is going to do what’s best for themselves, they could operate a mining operation exclusively to mine empty blocks if paid enough by a bad actor. Hypothetically.
Valid transactions cannot be stopped from being added to the timechain.
Even if you control 75% of the hash rate, all you will do is bid up the price of transaction fees. Someone will always be there to take the fee.
Good point, but there has to be some upper limit to the fees most people are willing to pay. I wonder if that's higher than a government can pay to offset.
If transactions become that slow and expensive because so few blocks that contain transactions are mined, it could effectively make the network useless.
But wouldn’t that undermine the incentive of the miners? The reward for the miners is the Coinbase and not so much the fees. If the coinbase gets worthless because the network dies there is no incentive to mine empty blocks in that scale.
But if their goal is to make money, as long as they are being paid enough to attack the network by a bad actor then they don’t care about the incentive of the network. They’re basically being paid to bring down the network. And in my opinion we have to assume that will happen if we really think bitcoin will become what we think it will. In other words, assume the worst and decentralize mining and block creation ASAP.
isn't it that sooner or later some other small miner (not paid by a country) will be lucky to find a block and do include the transaction that big centralized miners or governments wanted to censor?
and so, "worst case" it would take a bit longer, maybe a few days instead of 10 minutes, but still any valid transaction from anyone could be included, no?
Yes but would bitcoin be effective as a network at all if it takes days to get transactions into blocks and those transaction fees are also extremely high