[Adlai]

For the sake of quoting Greg Maxwell, I'd like to pick a nit. Bitcoin has no rules other than those you enforce yourself, and all these pools did was enforce fewer rules of their fellow players, than we assume they do.[4]

Optimize would be less judgmental than cheat and speaks more precisely to the motivations[1]... we do need to be careful about this and make sure we're managing the incentives. Cheating is a moral judgement[2]

Bonus quote, unearthed while digging up the above:

While the identifiable parties in question here were Chinese; the first miners I saw doing this in the pastwere not Chinese-- it's not a Chinese specific issue; its a response to orphan rate. (China just has lots of hash power and poor connectivity).[3]

[1] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3c305f/if_you_are_...

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/BitcoinMarkets/comments/3c2jci/dail...

[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3c305f/if_you_are_...

[4] One could interpret the block version increment as a policy advertisement, but you know what they say about assumptions.

[vessenes]

It's all good to quote Gmax, but I didn't say anyone was cheating, so I feel a bit straw-manned here.

And incrementing your version number is precisely a policy advertisement, full stop. It is saying you are in compliance with v1/2/3 of the spec. If you want to lie about that to other miners, there may well be consequences.

[Adlai]

There are coinbase flags for neither SPV status, nor honesty.

[tete]

They didn't cheat though, which in the end however means that they hurt (mostly) themselves (and their clients) and not others.

So I think it doesn't really apply here.