Mining is a technical procedure by which nodes of the blockchain network verify and validate transactions. Miners are awarded new tokens in exchange for their computing power. In the case of a block withholding attack, or a selfish mining scheme, a cartel conceals newly created blocks away from its main chain then revealing them at a later moment in time.

Block withholding, also known as selfish mining was first discovered in the work of Cornell scientists Emin Gun Sirer as well as Ittay Eyal within a paper from 2013. They showed that it was possible to earn more bitcoin by hiding recently mined blocks away from the main blockchain, creating an underlying blockchain fork. In theory, miners could add it on an existing network proper time and alter the blockchain.

In their 2013 paper, Sirer and Eyal showed that miners can increase their share of revenue by hiding new blocks, and then offering them to systems within their own private network. This method speeds up the process of discovery and eliminates infrastructure problems associated that arise from mining, such as power and latency issues.