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by YetAnotherMatt 2202 days ago
Would the following theoretically work?

1. Monitor all transactions in the public pool for their fees.

2. As soon as their is a public transaction in the pool that has over 1M$ in fees, spin up as many cloud resources as possible and mine for the block.

3. As soon as the block is mined, stop mining and go back to step 1.
1 comments
schoen 2202 days ago
Yes, but you have to worry about several things, at least:

* what's your latency for noticing and spinning up those resources (especially in chains where the average time between blocks is very short)?

* can you cost-effectively confidently outcompete ASIC miners with rented GPUs, even given a reward that's much larger than normal? (probably, given this very extreme anomaly, but you have to do the calculation)

* can you actually rent enough GPUs in practice to outcompete the ASIC miners?

* will it be worth it to ASIC miners who know or speculate that you're doing this to speculatively mine for a while on a shorter chain in which they receive the reward instead of you, in the hope that they can make it longer than yours?

Edit: Finally, do some of the ASIC miners have offline capacity (e.g. old equipment, or equipment located in places where electricity got more expensive) that is physically present in a datacenter but just powered off that they can also spin up quickly in response to these conditions?

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