I imagine what you might be describing is called the “egocentric mining” assault. It’s distinct from the standard which means of the “block witholding” assault, though it has apparent similarities.
Egocentric Mining
In concept
There appear to be many scholarly articles on the topic.
In essence, a egocentric mining assault is achieved by withholding the published of newly mined blocks to the general public community. By doing so, these miners can clandestinely proceed to mine the next block, getting a head begin and growing their possibilities of including extra blocks to the chain.
…
Whereas the idea of egocentric mining was theorized as early as 2010, it was illuminated by means of a paper by Cornell College researchers Eyal and Sirer.
In practise
Research have been made to detect this. For instance Li, SN., Campajola, C. & Tessone, C.J. Statistical detection of egocentric mining in proof-of-work blockchain techniques. Sci Rep 14, 6251 (2024).
We suggest a statistical check to analyse every miner’s behaviour in 5 in style cryptocurrencies: Bitcoin, Litecoin, Monacoin, Ethereum and Bitcoin Money. Our technique is predicated on the realisation that egocentric mining behaviour will trigger identifiable anomalies within the statistics of miner’s successive blocks discovery. Secondly, we apply heuristics-based deal with clustering to enhance the detectability of this type of behaviour. We discover a marked presence of irregular miners in Monacoin and Bitcoin Money, and, to a lesser extent, in Ethereum.
Which suggests there might need been no apparent occurrences in Bitcoin within the fourteen years since this was first mentioned.
