Mining Pool Game Theory During Forks(b10c.me)
b10c.me
Mining Pool Game Theory During Forks
https://b10c.me/blog/014-mining-pool-game-theory-during-forks/
2 comments
There is one aspect to the situation that I'm not sure this blog post factored in - the miners have an enormous incentive to preserve confidence in the integrity of the chain. If we assume that crypto behaves like a social network where there are super-linear advantages to a large number of participants, the most important thing for a large miner is that none of the rational participants feel like they are playing win-lose games with the miners. The worst-case isn't losing a block. There are lots of blocks out there. The worst case is a market participant in YourCoin decides to go hawk OtherCoin instead because they don't know what blocks are trustworthy in the short term.
However this is only true for miners that are loyal to a coin. If you are in a mining pool that mines whatever is profitable and immediately exchanges it for your favorite currency then you don't care about any given coin. You still want to preserve trust in crypto as a whole though, so you wouldn't go completely crazy