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How, if at all, does bitcoin disincentivize spam blocks by adversarial/dishonest miners?

As I understand it, blocks are propagated throughout the network using a gossip protocol. If that's true, I think it means that each miner is aware of some subset of other miners to which they can propose blocks to be included in the blockchain. Is that correct?

If so, could someone theoretically write some software that simply proposes bad/fake/spam blocks to other miners as a DDoS attack? If not, why not? If so, do these attacks happen with any meaningful frequency?

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    Does this answer your question? Possibility of a DDoS attack. Miners/Pools generally don't make proposals to other miners/pools specifically, they make peers in general aware of new data AFAIK.
    – RedGrittyBrick
    Jul 12, 2021 at 20:13
  • Miners get block templates from the pool operator not from other random miners
    – Mike D
    Jul 12, 2021 at 20:19
  • Ah, looks like I have a fundamental misunderstanding. The explanation of the banscore helps a lot @RedGrittyBrick, thanks! @MikeD what about miners that don't participate in a pool? Do you have docs I can read about block templates?
    – Paymahn Moghadasian
    Jul 12, 2021 at 20:30

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