Selfish mining and associated challanges

How are you? Hope so everyone would be safe and sound just like me as I am also safe Alhamdulillah....

Selfish mining is my today topic that I am going to share with all of you and not only I am going to share about it simply but I am also explaining it with the help of an example along with the challenges that are associated with it.

If in mining process any miner is trying to get illegal advantage from mining then it would be regarding as selfish mining because it is just for self benefit and in this strategy with holding and to maintain our delay in releasing new mine blocks happens for the manipulation of blockchain and for increasing their personal profits.

Image source

Now I want to explain selfish mining strategy in detail with the help of an example so you can suppose that there is a group of people who are basically miners and they are working together in the process of mining so these miners are not sharing blocks immediately with each other that they find out with other network and they are keeping new blocks saved to them and in this way it is not tough for them to continue for the mining because they can continue mining easily on their blocks that are secret because other network or rest of network is unknown regarding this level of progress by some of the group of miners

Now question arises that when they would reveal and release the blocks that they keep secret so after they have long chain then rest of the network they would reveal it easily and consequences all results for rest of the network or blockchain results in discard of their work and to start mining at longer chain so in this way selfish miners would get high amount of mining rewards even if they are contributing less for overall network.

Now I want to talk about overall challenges that are associated with strategy of selfish mining so one of the most important challenges include is more potential of a network towards centralization due to selfish mining because by selfish mining any group can accumulate and collect a high amount of power and influence act over all network which is totally against the rule of decentralization because role of decentralisation is the promotion of fairness and equal control to everyone but this thing spoil it.

Disruption in consensus is another problem which is associated with selfish mining process so in this way it is results in breakdown of consensus mechanism.Selfish miners feel very easy in creating forks in blockchain by holding blocks and by revealing them in a proper way followed by a tree planned strategy so when in this regard transaction confirmation time would delay then it will create over all confusion also which would keep reliability and efficiency of network at risk and doubt.

There are many economic implications also associated with selfish mining process because when without any contribution proportional to the security of network selfish miners earn hi amount of mining rewards then those miners that always remain sincere feel very discourage from participating in overall network activities which reduce in activity of mining due to discouragement of different honest miners Resilience and efficiency remain compromised in this way.

Image source

When I talk about briefly that how we can address these challenges then it requires a lot of research and development of consensus algorithms and protocols of a particular network or blockchain that are associated with it and currently there are different communities related to cryptocurrency and developers that are very active in their working on finding out the solutions and for mitigation of this that are associated with selfish mining so by the implementation of some of the necessary steps it is easy to develope honest behaviour and to discourage those strategies that are associated with selfish mining and ultimate goal of all these things would be for improvement of fair and decentralised nature of network or blockchain.

That was all about selfish mining and some of the challenges which were associated with it as well as I have also talked in a brief way that what we can do for getting rid of all these challenges that are linked and associated with selfish mining and what are the goals behind eliminating the challenges so hopefully this topic is very clear and understandable for all of you.