Is "fee higher than block reward" attack possible?

Question

Imagine the following scenario:

• I send you 1000 BTC.

• After 6 confirmations, you give me what I bought.

• I create another transaction with 900 BTC to my own wallet and 100 BTC as transaction fee, using the same input as the previous transaction. (double spend)

• The mining pools find that 100 BTC is higher than 6 block rewards which is 12.5 * 6 = 75 BTC, so they start to mine on the last block which doesn't contain my first transaction.

• Those 6 confirmations are orphaned and the pools earned more money.

• My double spending succeeded.

I know that this mining strategy is not implemented in most pools today, but nothing is preventing pools from doing this in the future.

100 BTC is a large amount of money. But after many years the block reward will be very low, so this attack may not require so much money to perform in the future.

I googled and didn't find any related questions.

I want to know whether this kind of attack is possible in practice and what we can do to prevent this.

Answer 1

An attack like this is possible, it is just a way to profit off a 51% attack. However you must remember several things:

• if a miner controls less than 51% of the hashpower, then chances are they will not be able to catch back up to the network after mining the malicious tx, so the honest network will prevail as the longest chain

• if a miner tries the attack but fails to succeed, they will have wasted a lot of resources in doing so (opportunity cost). Compare this to a more guaranteed profit of not being malicious

• if an attack like this succeeded and users noticed, it would hurt the security of the network, and thus coin prices should be expected to fall. So the miner has undermined their own investment.

If you hunt around online, I have seen a simple formula for determining the value of transaction vs the number of block confirmations to wait for before considering the tx ‘final’. Your line of reasoning is correct: for larger transfers of value, the wait period should be longer, so that the potential reward of malicious behaviour is outweighed by the reward of honest mining.