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Re:CryptoKitties craze slows down transactions on Ethereum by DennisP on Tuesday December 05, 2017 @02:22PM (#15854846)
If miners get paid for valid blocks that don't end up included in the chain, that also makes the 1s less of an advantage. Hence GHOST. Here's the original paper [1] and a later one [2].

[1] https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Accelerating-Bitcoin-s...

[2] https://eprint.iacr.org/2016/545.pdf

Re:CryptoKitties craze slows down transactions on Ethereum by etr-strike on Tuesday December 05, 2017 @02:44PM (#15855106)
Sure, maybe including uncle blocks can help secure the chain. It's not without cost, however: now you're forever persisting valueless blobs of data as part of your blockchain.
Re:CryptoKitties craze slows down transactions on Ethereum by DennisP on Tuesday December 05, 2017 @03:05PM (#15855290)
It's just an extra block header every few blocks, which is a minuscule amount of data compared to the transaction records. And it's not actually valueless since the uncles are part of the block selection algorithm and therefore contribute to security.