Related papers: A Deep Dive into Blockchain Selfish Mining
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…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom…
Bitcoin mining presents a significant economic incentive for efficient hashing and broadcast of data, both parameters stemming from the Proofs of Work used to advance the network. This incentive has led to the development of Bitcoin…
Many of today's crypto currencies use blockchains as decentralized ledgers and secure them with proof of work. In case of a fork of the chain, Bitcoin's rule for achieving consensus is selecting the longest chain and discarding the other…
The resource-consuming mining of blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol bears the risk of ruin, namely when the operational costs for the mining exceed the received rewards. In this paper we investigate to…
We study a game-theoretic model of blockchain mining economies and show that griefing, a practice according to which participants harm other participants at some lesser cost to themselves, is a prevalent threat at its Nash equilibria. The…
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…
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…
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…
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…
Blockchain denial of service (BDoS) and selfish mining are the two most crucial attacks on blockchain technology. A classical DoS attack targets the computer network to limit, restrict, or stop accessing the system of authorized users which…
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]…
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 blockchain-based order book systems, buyers and sellers trade assets, while it is miners to match them and include their transactions in the blockchain. It is found that many miners behave selfishly and myopically, prioritizing…
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…
Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency, and an accompanying protocol, created in 2008. Bitcoin nodes continuously generate and propagate blocks---collections of newly approved transactions that are added to Bitcoin's ledger. Block…
In blockchain networks adopting the proof-of-work schemes, the monetary incentive is introduced by the Nakamoto consensus protocol to guide the behaviors of the full nodes (i.e., block miners) in the process of maintaining the consensus…
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…
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…
Understanding the strategic behavior of miners in a blockchain is of great importance for its proper operation. A common model for mining games considers an infinite time horizon, with players optimizing asymptotic average objectives.…