English

Generic Selfish Mining MDP for DAG Protocols

Cryptography and Security 2024-05-01 v2 Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing

Abstract

Selfish Mining is strategic rule-breaking to maximize rewards in proof-of-work protocols [3] and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the preferred tool for finding optimal strategies in Bitcoin [4, 10] and similar linear chain protocols [12]. Protocols increasingly adopt non-sequential chain structures [11], for which MDP analysis is more involved [2]. To date, researchers have tailored specific attack spaces for each protocol [2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12]. Assumptions differ, and validating and comparing results is difficult. To overcome this, we propose a generic attack space that supports a wide range of DAG protocols, including Ethereum, Fruitchains, and Parallel Proof-of-Work. Our approach is modular: we specify each protocol as one program, and then derive the Selfish Mining MDPs automatically.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2309.11924,
  title  = {Generic Selfish Mining MDP for DAG Protocols},
  author = {Patrik Keller},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2309.11924},
  year   = {2024}
}

Comments

v2: update authors, fix my implementation of Roi's model

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:28:07.411Z