Comment by roenxi
6 hours ago
The Eyal & Sirer paper is pretty interesting - they basically point out that there is actually some game theory involved in when miners should reveal that they mined a block to compete most effectively with their fellows. If a pool can set up a situation where they mine a block and wait X seconds to reveal it, they can force other miners to waste X seconds of has power and gain an advantage.
It looks like a result with complex implications - eg, maybe making it impossible for new miners to set up unless they have a meaningful advantage in operating costs instead of just parity with the entrenched players. It is hard to tell because market reality is a mess but if there is a meaningful strategic choice to be made beyond simply announcing a block when it is mined then there is a lot of room for weird equilibriums even if the paper's specific analysis turns out to have flaws.
Isn't this the same thing as saying "if everyone just agrees that a dollar bill is actually just a piece of paper, USD becomes worthless"? Albeit at a smaller scale
I don't think it is the same thing. Everyone agrees that mining the next block is valuable.
Unless they didn’t.
There’s nothing inherently valuable about crypto beyond what value people assign to it in their minds.
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