I’ve come full circle on selfish mining

I gotta admit. At the beginning I was onboard with team 15-minutes. I was convinced that the selfish miner problem was to be viewed from the perspective of the SM and that if we start the mining process at T-10, in cases where the SM finds a block at T-0 it’s an average of 15 minutes later that the HM finds a block, and that is still true. The key words here are In cases where . This entire line of reasoning discounts the fact that the problem starts at T-10 and that in roughly 1/3 of cases, a block will get found by the HM before we ever get to T-0. Are these blocks any less valid? The SM is still hashing against the HM while these blocks are being found and expending work and effort so it makes no sense to ignore them. So, if we look at the problem taking that into account, and say that the SM finds his block at T-0 regardless of HM’s progress, then on average HM will find his block at T+5. The key thing which I discounted previously is that in something like 1/3 of the puzzle iterations, when SM finds his block at T-0, the HM will have already found a block and will be hard at work mining the subsequent block and this is the key to the puzzle.

submitted by /u/The_Beer_Engineer
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