Sluggish Mining: Profiting from the Verifier’s Dilemma

Miners in Ethereum need to make a choice when they receive a block: they can fully validate the block by executing every transaction in order to validate the new state, but this consumes precious time that could be used on mining the next block. Alternatively, miners could skip some of the verification stages and proceed with the mining, taking the risk of building on top of a potentially invalid block. This is referred to as the verifier’s dilemma.