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You have to trust miners and developers with blockchains still.

You only have to trust that at least 50% of all miners are legitimate. And the public can choose to adopt what the developers create.

Not quite. You have to trust that they aren't colluding. It's fine if they're malicious as long as they aren't aligned

It's not fine if 51% of miners are maliciously mining empty blocks. no collusion necessary.

If 51% are simply mining empty blocks then tx rate drops by ~1/2 and tx fees double. tx would still go through unless they are colluding.

If 20% of bitcoin miners 'wasted' block space with a very high minimum transaction fee to drive up average transaction fees you get a huge problem. (This could actually be a net gain depending on the demand curve.)

If you look at the actual block chain there are many empty blocks so this is less theoretical than you might assume.

Another attack is if you get say 40% of miners to block transactions for a specific company you could create a lot of issues for them at minimal costs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com