English

Bitcoin Selfish Mining and Dyck Words

Cryptography and Security 2019-02-06 v1 Combinatorics Probability

Abstract

We give a straightforward proof for the formula giving the long-term apparent hashrate of the Selfish Mining strategy in Bitcoin using only elementary probabilities and combinatorics, and more precisely, Dyck words. There is no need to compute stationary probabilities on Markov chain nor stopping times for Poisson processes as it was previously done. We consider also several other block withholding strategies.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1902.01513,
  title  = {Bitcoin Selfish Mining and Dyck Words},
  author = {Cyril Grunspan and Ricardo Pérez-Marco},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1902.01513},
  year   = {2019}
}

Comments

5 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-06-23T07:32:06.944Z