r0ach = Half of BTT? Well maybe there are lot of sock puppets on here, lol. 

Anyway, I don't think you can easily answer "how much reputation" cost, but you can't say that failure to take short term advantage is not a Nash equilibrium when reputational costs exist, because that is an alternate consistent explanation.

Miners can not operate anonymously nor do anything useful with selfish mining or double spends as long as they are mining on pools, which the huge majority of the hash rate is currently doing. Only the pools themselves could do that, and they aren't anonymous.

If a large anonymous solo miners existed and had the opportunity to engage in selfish mining but didn't, your theory would be validated, but how could this ever be tested? I think it is impossible.

You could argue that a bunch of large miners would be better off on private pools or something, and by choosing to use public pools they are not in a Nash equilibrium, but the whole argument becomes complex, since pools benefit when other miners join them, so there is an incentive to be public, large visible actors such as Bitmain might be better off using a visible public pool since it isolates them from false accusations of misconduct, etc.

Also, the theory of selfish mining has some repeated game problems, since it assumes everyone else doesn't selfish mine. If others selfish mine, the defense is to selfish mine yourself, and if multiple large miners of equal size all selfish mine, then it is obvious none retains any advantage. If there are several large miners (or pools), they may be better off not bothering to start the conflict, especially given even small potential for reputational consequences.

Why? https://socrates1024.s3.amazonaws.com/consensus.pdf: "Abstract—We present a formal model of synchronous processes without distinct identifiers (i.e., anonymous processes) that communicate using one-way public broadcasts."

That's not evidence of Bitcoin operating outside a Nash equilibrium, which was CfB's argument. Most of the hash rate 80%+ obviously mines on very large pools. The rest may do something else, and it might even be a bad decision on their part, but that little 20% doesn't really affect how Bitcoin operates.


I don't know which pools support getblocktemplate, but there's no evidence of anyone using it (most if not all ASIC gear just connects directly to the pool and uses stratum). Seems like that concept mostly died when Luke-Jr lost the original argument with slush.

Well, if both our arguments are not obvious then let's wait while one of us writes a whitepaper. For now, the fact that people keep talking about 51% attack while the threshold can't be above 33%, shows how little they care about anything except speculation on BTC price.