Censorship Attacks: Punitive Forking

Let’s look at another strategy for Gloria.

Remember that Gloria’s mining pools have over 51% of the network hashrate.

She can say that all Glorian pools will refuse to work on a chain containing transactions spending from my address and announce this to the world.

If miners include one of my transactions in a block, Gloria will fork and create a longer proof-of-work chain, which is possible only because she has the majority of the hashrate.

The blocks containing my transactions are now invalid since they aren’t on the longest chain and will never be published.

This also means that the miners on that chain will receive no mining rewards for their efforts.

Non-Glorian miners will eventually stop including my transactions in their blocks since they know that their blocks won’t be part of the longest chain anway.

They’ll be invalidated by Glorian miners.

This strategy is known as punitive forking, and can be very powerful in the hands of someone with a 51% majority hashrate.

That entity can prevent anybody from accessing their funds.

  Censorship Attacks: Feather Forking