SELFISH MINING ATTACK: EXPLAINED from Asic Marketplace's blog

Within the cryptocurrency community, there has been much discussion on the heated topic of selfish mining. Basically, selfish mining is a tactic used by a miner or group of miners to boost earnings by taking advantage of flaws in the mining procedure. Some believe it is used for the best interests of the miners; however, some claim that it is a destructive force that negatively affects the crypto-mining industry.

This blog aims to provide you with a detailed view of selfish mining, its working, potential threats against the blockchain and effects on the mining ecosystem.

What is Selfish Mining?

Withholding or postponing the release of new blocks on purpose in order to obtain a competitive edge over other miners is known as selfish mining. The usual procedure for a miner to add a new block to their copy of the blockchain is to broadcast it to the network.
It can be defined simply as the state in which a single miner or group of miners controls more than half of the overall hash rate, enabling them to influence the blockchain to their benefit. With selfish mining, the miner can decide to keep the block a secret and carry on mining on top of it to extend the chain. As a result, other miners’ work on shorter chains can be declared invalid, and this longer chain can be broadcast to the network.
Miners execute selfish mining to maximize their income, which involves keeping newly found blocks hidden from the rest of the network and only revealing them once another miner has figured out the puzzle for the next block. It increases the selfish miners’ likelihood of mining the next block by giving them a head start on solving the next block.