Examples of miner misbehavior
Let's examine some scenarios of how a miner could potentially misbehave, and what follows on from that.
One such threat could be a miner who decides not to follow the rules for block rewards and tries to grab more coins in the coinbase transaction. According to the protocol, block rewards were 50 Bitcoin initially, with the issuing schedule halving every 4 years. So, currently it is 12.5 Bitcoin after it has halved twice since the launch of Bitcoin.
Consider a situation where a miner decides to try and reward himself or herself with 1,000 Bitcoin for mining a block, rather than 12.5, as per the protocol. Even if this greedy node successfully does the Proof-of-Work and comes up first with a solution to the cryptographic ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access