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Comment by bawolff | Hacker News Reader

There are still transaction fees to encourage mining.

If you are interested in more detail, the original bitcoin paper goes in detail and is decently well written and much more straight forward to read then most people probably expect.

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A lack of block rewards will incentivize all kinds of bad miner behavior:

https://economics.princeton.edu/working-papers/on-the-instab...

A nice quote:

> ... we are able to prove that an equilibrium exists. However, it is one where miners include only a fraction of available transactions into their blocks. This results in a backlog of transactions whose size grows indefinitely with time.

I agree that the game theory arguments about it all working out become much more hand wavey once rewards decline, but on the face of it, i don't neccesarily think not all transactions being processed is a problem (just retry with a higher transaction fee)

In that case, the fee will keep rising until _some_ miner puts it into a block. Mining is decentralized so empty block attacks won't work unless they all collaborate (good luck with that).

> Mining is decentralized

To me, it appears more that mining is effectively centralized in an oligopoly of mining pools, and that there's an increasing tendency towards this, compare [1] in this thread.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31796847

That's because you don't understand how mining pools work

It doesn't appear so that everyone would be free to setup their self-sustained rigg and frolic on their own with realistic prospects, as the mantra of "decentralized" (as opposed to a structured environment) alleges. At least, not at a scale that would be decisive for the entire network. Meaning, there's that structured aspect and individual miners come second to this.

But can that oligopoly collude enough to actually run a 51% attack against the network?

I guess, as is, there are sufficient incentives against this, as pointed out by the linked comment. Generally speaking, when the economic pressure increases, the pressure to cooperate may increase, as well. Which may turn out both ways. (Meaning: I really don't know, and I'm not sure anyone may know for sure. Sorry for the Socratic anticlimax.) Said paper suggests that there are incentives for colluding against the system while protecting it at the same time.

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