What Is the Concept of “Selfish Mining” and How Does It Differ from Fee Sniping?

Selfish mining is a strategy where a miner or pool secretly mines blocks and withholds them from the public network, only releasing them strategically to gain a disproportionately large share of the block rewards. It is a long-term attack on the network's fairness.

Fee sniping, in contrast, is a short-term, opportunistic attempt to steal the transaction fees of a single, recently mined block found by a competitor. Selfish mining is about manipulating chain length; fee sniping is about manipulating block content.