Jul 18, 2023

Things a coalition of evil miners can do on Bitcoin

Things a coalition of evil miners can do on Bitcoin

If a miner coalition has 75% of hashrate for 6 months they can steal coins from a naddr1qvzqqqr4gupzqwlsccluhy6xxsr6l9a9uhhxf75g85g8a709tprjcn4e42h053vaqyghwumn8ghj7enfv96x5ctx9e3k7mgqpfj8y6tkv43ksctfdc9qways without any risk, that's what the drivechain haters say.

What other evil things can a coalition of 75% hashrate do in 6 months?

  • steal money from all open Lightning nodes on the network by opening channels to them, mining 3 blocks, spending the funds out on Lightning instantly, then rolling back the 3 blocks and canceling the channel.
  • the above would eventually -- but not instantly and only after many steals have happened (even if they're not all perfectly coordinated and instant) -- cause Lightning to shrink in size a lot and become more of a closed friends network than truly open.
  • only mine empty blocks and cause the mempool to be enormously clogged.
  • refuse to use the mempool, force a proprietary API for transaction propagation with zero transparency and force other miners to use that same infrastructure too and extract a fee from them.
  • censor anything and force other miners to censor too, at the threat of orphaning their blocks.
  • easily cause so much confusion in the mining process that Bitcoin is deemed unusable and price falls drastically, miners can then buy at low price.