[Bitcoin-development] we can all relax now

[kjj <bitcoin-devel@jerviss.org>]

One of the things that really gets me going is when someone devises a 
model, tests it against itself, and then pretends that they've learned 
something about the real world.

Naturally, the Selfish Mining paper is exactly this sort of nonsense.  
Their model is one with no latency, and one where the attacker has total 
visibility across the network.  An iterated FSM is not a suitable 
simulation of the bitcoin system.  The bitcoin network does not have 
states, and to the extent that you can pretend that we do, you can't 
simulate transitions between them with static probabilities.

The authors understand this deep down inside, even though they didn't 
work out the implications.  They handwave the issue by assuming a total 
sybil attack, and in true academic spirit, they don't realize that the 
condition necessary for the attack is far, far worse than the attack itself.

Greg said he'd like to run some simulations, and I'm thinking about it 
too.  Unfortunately, he is busy all week, and I'm lazy (and also busy 
for most of tomorrow).

If neither of us get to it first, I'm willing to pitch in 1 BTC as a 
bounty for building a general bitcoin network simulator framework. The 
simulator should be able to account for latency between nodes, and 
ideally within a node.  It needs to be able to simulate an attacker that 
owns varying fractions of the network, and make decisions based only on 
what the attacker actually knows.  It needs to be able to simulate this 
"attack" and should be generic enough to be easily modified for other 
crazy schemes.

(Bounty offer is serious, but expires in one year [based on the earliest 
timestamp that my mail server puts on this email], and /may/ be subject 
to change if the price on any reputable exchange breaks 1000 USD per BTC 
in that period.)

Basically, the lack of a decent network simulator is what allowed this 
paper to get press.  If the author had been able to see the importance 
of the stuff he was ignoring, we wouldn't be wasting so much time 
correcting him (and sadly the reporters that have no way to check his 
claims).

https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=324413.msg3495663#msg3495663