English
Related papers

Related papers: On profitability of selfish mining

200 papers

In this paper we revisit the mining strategies in proof of work based cryptocurrencies and propose two strategies, we call smart and smarter mining, that in many cases strictly dominate honest mining. In contrast to other known attacks,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-02-13 Guy Goren , Alexander Spiegelman

As the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and today's biggest decentralized platform that runs smart contracts, Ethereum has received much attention from both industry and academia. Nevertheless, there exist very few…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-07-13 Jianyu Niu , Chen Feng

Cryptographic Self-Selection is a common primitive underlying leader-selection for Proof-of-Stake blockchain protocols. The concept was first popularized in Algorand [CM19], who also observed that the protocol might be manipulable. [FHWY22]…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-07-25 Linda Cai , Jingyi Liu , S. Matthew Weinberg , Chenghan Zhou

In this paper, we provide a novel dynamic decision method of blockchain selfish mining by applying the sensitivity-based optimization theory. Our aim is to find the optimal dynamic blockchain-pegged policy of the dishonest mining pool. To…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-11-16 Jing-Yu Ma , Quan-Lin Li

The selfish mining attack, arguably the most famous game-theoretic attack in blockchain, indicates that the Bitcoin protocol is not incentive-compatible. Most subsequent works mainly focus on strengthening the selfish mining strategy, thus…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2022-02-21 Mengqian Zhang , Yuhao Li , Jichen Li , Chaozhe Kong , Xiaotie Deng

Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by miners to steal block rewards. In this paper, we explore a new form of selfish mining attack that guarantees high rewards with low cost. We show the feasibility of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-12-18 Muhammad Saad , Laurent Njilla , Charles Kamhoua , Aziz Mohaisen

Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-03-16 Yoko Shibuya , Go Yamamoto , Fuhito Kojima , Elaine Shi , Shin'ichiro Matsuo , Aron Laszka

The main goal of this article is to present a direct approach for the formula giving the long-term apparent hashrates of Selfish Mining strategies using only elementary probabilities and combinatorics, more precisely, Dyck words. We can…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-04-17 Cyril Grunspan , Ricardo Pérez-Marco

Mining attacks allow adversaries to obtain a disproportionate share of the mining reward by deviating from the honest mining strategy in the Bitcoin system. Among them, the most well-known are selfish mining (SM), block withholding (BWH),…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2023-05-15 Junjie Hu , Chunxiang Xu , Zhe Jiang , Jiwu Cao

Bitcoin is firmly becoming a mainstream asset in our global society. Its highly volatile nature has traders and speculators flooding into the market to take advantage of its significant price swings in the hope of making money. This work…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2021-10-29 Nathan Crone , Eoin Brophy , Tomas Ward

We describe and analyze perishing mining, a novel block-withholding mining strategy that lures profit-driven miners away from doing useful work on the public chain by releasing block headers from a privately maintained chain. We then…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-02-10 Tong Cao , Jérémie Decouchant , Jiangshan Yu

Selfish mining is strategic rule-breaking to maximize rewards in proof-of-work protocols. Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the preferred tool for finding optimal strategies in Bitcoin and similar linear chain protocols. Protocols…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-06-24 Patrik Keller

Bitcoin-NG, a scalable blockchain protocol, divides each block into a key block and many micro blocks to effectively improve the transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG has a special incentive mechanism (i.e. splitting transaction fees…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-06-23 Taotao Wang , Xiaoqian Bai , Hao Wang , Soung Chang Liew , Shengli Zhang

Stubborn mining attack greatly downgrades Bitcoin throughput and also benefits malicious miners (attackers). This paper aims to quantify the impact of block receiving delay on stubborn mining attack severity in imperfect Bitcoin networks.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Haoran Zhu , Xiaolin Chang , Jelena Mišić , Vojislav B. Mišić

The value of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies critically depends on miners having incentives to follow the protocol. However, the Bitcoin mining protocol proposed by Nakamoto (2008) and implemented in practice is well known not to constitute…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-04-08 Manuel Mueller-Frank , Minghao Pan , Omer Tamuz

Conventional double-spending attack models ignore the revenue losses stemming from the orphan blocks. On the other hand, selfish mining literature usually ignores the chance of the attacker to double-spend at no-cost in each attack cycle.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-23 Mustafa Doger , Sennur Ulukus

Our aim in this paper is to investigate the profitability of double-spending (DS) attacks that manipulate an a priori mined transaction in a blockchain. It was well understood that a successful DS attack is established when the proportion…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-10-15 Jehyuk Jang , Heung-No Lee

Selfish mining, which is an attack on the integrity of the Bitcoin network, was first proposed by Cornell researchers Emin Gun Sirer and Ittay Eyal in 2013. Selfish mining attack also exists in most Nakamoto consensus protocols. Generally…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2018-09-18 Rui Tian , Wei Gong

We analyze Qubic's publicly claimed selfish mining attack against Monero in 2025. By combining measurements from Monero nodes, the Qubic pool API, and Qubic-network observations, we reconstruct Qubic-attributed blocks and effective hashrate…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-02-03 Suhyeon Lee , Hyeongyeong Kim

Proof-of-Work blockchain, despite its numerous benefits, is still not an entirely secure technology due to the existence of Selfish Mining (SM) strategies that can disrupt the system and its mining economy. While the effect of SM has been…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-10-08 Tin Leelavimolsilp , Long Tran-Thanh , Sebastian Stein , Viet Hung Nguyen