What Is the Primary Mechanism That Allows Selfish Mining to Gain an Advantage? ▴ Learn

What Is the Primary Mechanism That Allows Selfish Mining to Gain an Advantage?

Selfish mining gains an advantage by secretly mining a chain of blocks and withholding them from the public network. When an honest miner finds a block, the selfish miner releases their secret chain, potentially invalidating the honest miner's block.

This forces the network to adopt the selfish miner's longer chain, effectively 'stealing' block rewards from honest miners and increasing the selfish miner's proportional revenue. This strategy capitalizes on the longest chain rule.

What Is the ‘Longest Chain Rule’ and How Does It Resolve Conflicting Blocks?

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

What Is the Difference between Selfish Mining and a 51% Attack?

How Does a “Chain Split” Occur and How Is It Resolved by the Longest Chain Rule?