How Can a Mining Pool Inadvertently Facilitate Selfish Mining?
A large mining pool, by concentrating a significant portion of the network's hashrate, can inadvertently make the network more vulnerable to selfish mining. If a pool operator or a coordinated group of miners within the pool decides to execute a selfish mining strategy, the sheer size of the pool's hashrate can push the collective past the profitability threshold.
The pool's centralized control structure is the point of vulnerability.
Glossar
Mining Pool
Pool ⎊ The concept of a mining pool, within the cryptocurrency ecosystem, represents a collaborative effort among numerous miners to combine computational resources and share the rewards derived from successfully validating blockchain transactions.
Mining Pools
Pool ⎊ Cryptocurrency mining pools represent collaborative efforts where numerous miners combine their computational resources to increase the probability of solving a block and earning rewards.
Mining
Extraction ⎊ Mining, within the context of cryptocurrency, represents the computationally intensive process of verifying and adding new transaction records to a distributed ledger, typically employing a Proof-of-Work consensus mechanism, and incentivized through the issuance of newly created cryptocurrency and transaction fees.
Selfish
Exploitation ⎊ In cryptocurrency derivatives and options trading, "selfish" denotes a strategic, albeit controversial, behavior primarily observed in Bitcoin mining.
Selfish Mining
Block ⎊ The concept of selfish mining, initially observed within the Bitcoin protocol, describes a strategic deviation from standard proof-of-work consensus mechanisms.