Why Bitcoin Mining Pools Aren’t Incentivized to Broadcast Blocks Quickly

It is generally accepted that latency in block propagation is one of the bottlenecks for Bitcoin scaling. This is why many of Bitcoin’s most active developers and researchers have presented a series of solutions to compress blocks and speed up propagation over the past years.
It is not as well known that these solutions may not suffice on their own. Due to a practice called ‘spy mining’ or ‘pool-watcher mining,’ Bitcoin mining has increasingly come to rely on the data and network infrastructure provided by mining pools.
As a result, many mining pools are not necessarily incentivized to broadcast their blocks to the network as fast as they can – regardless of latency in block propagation.

This post was published at Bitcoin Magazine on Sep 30, 2016.