Related papers: Resisting Selfish Mining Attacks in the Bicomp
It has been known for some time that the Nakamoto consensus as implemented in the Bitcoin protocol is not totally aligned with the individual interests of the participants. More precisely, it has been shown that block withholding mining…
Mining attacks aim to gain an unfair share of extra rewards in the blockchain mining. Selfish mining can preserve discovered blocks and strategically release them, wasting honest miners' computing resources and getting higher profits.…
Selfish miners selectively withhold blocks to earn disproportionately high revenue. The vast majority of the selfish mining literature focuses exclusively on block rewards. Carlsten et al. [2016] is a notable exception, observing that…
We study selfish mining attacks in longest-chain blockchains like Bitcoin, but where the proof of work is replaced with efficient proof systems -- like proofs of stake or proofs of space -- and consider the problem of computing an optimal…
In the last few years several papers investigated selfish mine attacks, most of which assumed that every miner that is not part of the selfish mine pool will continue to mine honestly. However, in reality, remaining honest is not always…
Nakamoto consensus are the most widely adopted decentralized consensus mechanism in cryptocurrency systems. Since it was proposed in 2008, many studies have focused on analyzing its security. Most of them focus on maximizing the profit of…
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain PoW consensus on how the existence of multiple misbehaving miners influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner (or attacker interchangeably)…
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…
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…
We study selfish mining in Ethereum. The problem is combinatorially more complex than in Bitcoin because of major differences in the reward system and a different difficulty adjustment formula. Equivalent strategies in Bitcoin do have…
The core of many cryptocurrencies is the decentralised validation network operating on proof-of-work technology. In these systems, validation is done by so-called miners who can digitally sign blocks once they solve a computationally-hard…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain…
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain on how the existence of multiple misbehaving pools influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner maintains a private chain and makes it…
In the context of the `selfish-mine' strategy proposed by Eyal and Sirer, we study the effect of propagation delay on the evolution of the Bitcoin blockchain. First, we use a simplified Markov model that tracks the contrasting states of…
Blockchain has received great attention in recent years and motivated innovations in different scenarios. However, many vital issues which affect its performance are still open. For example, it is widely convinced that high level of…
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,…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…
Bitcoin's security relies on its Proof-of-Work consensus, where miners solve puzzles to propose blocks. The puzzle's difficulty is set by the difficulty adjustment mechanism (DAM), based on the network's available mining power. Attacks that…
Bitcoin was recently introduced as a peer-to-peer electronic currency in order to facilitate transactions outside the traditional financial system. The core of Bitcoin, the Blockchain, is the history of the transactions in the system…
Blockchain security is threatened by selfish mining, where a miner (operator) deviates from the protocol to increase their revenue. Selfish mining is exacerbated by adverse conditions: rushing (network propagation advantage for the selfish…