English
Related papers

Related papers: Discouraging Pool Block Withholding Attacks in Bit…

200 papers

We consider the block withholding attacks on pools, more specifically the state-of-the-art Power Adjusting Withholding (PAW) attack. We propose a generalization called Temporary PAW (T-PAW) where the adversary withholds a fPoW from pool…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Mustafa Doger , Sennur Ulukus

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2013-11-18 Ittay Eyal , Emin Gun Sirer

The security of Bitcoin protocols is deeply dependent on the incentives provided to miners, which come from a combination of block rewards and transaction fees. As Bitcoin experiences more halving events, the protocol reward converges to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-09-12 Roozbeh Sarenche , Alireza Aghabagherloo , Svetla Nikova , Bart Preneel

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

Mining attacks enable an adversary to procure a disproportionately large portion of mining rewards by deviating from honest mining practices within the PoW-based blockchain system. In this paper, we demonstrate that the security…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-05-12 Junjie Hu , Na Ruan

We model and analyze blockchain miners who seek to maximize the compound return of their mining businesses. The analysis of the optimal strategies finds a new equilibrium point among the miners and the mining pools, which predicts the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-12-07 Go Yamamoto , Aron Laszka , Fuhito Kojima

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-08-11 Maryam Bahrani , Michael Neuder , S. Matthew Weinberg

Mining pools, the main components of the Bitcoin network, dominate the computing resources and play essential roles in network security and performance aspects. Although many existing measurements of the Bitcoin network are available,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-02-22 Canhui Wang , Xiaowen Chu , Qin Yang

We study the strategic considerations of miners participating in the bitcoin's protocol. We formulate and study the stochastic game that underlies these strategic considerations. The miners collectively build a tree of blocks, and they are…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2016-07-11 Aggelos Kiayias , Elias Koutsoupias , Maria Kyropoulou , Yiannis Tselekounis

Eyal and Sirer's selfish mining strategy has demonstrated that Bitcoin system is not secure even if 50% of total mining power is held by altruistic miners. Since then, researchers have been investigating either to improve the efficiency of…

Multiagent Systems · Computer Science 2018-02-08 Tin Leelavimolsilp , Long Tran-Thanh , Sebastian Stein

Mining processes of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are currently incentivized with voluntary transaction fees and fixed block rewards which will halve gradually to zero. In the setting where optional and arbitrary transaction fee…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-07-14 Tiantian Gong , Mohsen Minaei , Wenhai Sun , Aniket Kate

Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-06-02 Arian Baloochestani , Leander Jehl

In 2015, Eyal proposed the first game-theoretical model for analyzing the equilibrium of blockchain pooling: when the blockchain pools are abstracted as a non-cooperative game, two pools can reach a Nash equilibrium with a closed-form…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-05-06 Dongfang Zhao

The Bitcoin protocol prescribes certain behavior by the miners who are responsible for maintaining and extending the underlying blockchain; in particular, miners who successfully solve a puzzle, and hence can extend the chain by a block,…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2019-06-12 Francisco J. Marmolejo-Cossío , Eric Brigham , Benjamin Sela , Jonathan Katz

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.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Jiaping Yu , Shang Gao , Rui Song , Zhiping Cai , Bin Xiao

In cryptocurrencies, the block reward is meant to serve as the incentive mechanism for miners to commit resources to create blocks and in effect secure the system. Existing systems primarily divide the reward in proportion to expended…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2021-03-24 Lucianna Kiffer , Rajmohan Rajaraman

Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-11-19 Ghader Ebrahimpour , Mohammad Sayad Haghighi

It is an important decision-making problem for a miner in the blockchain networks if he/she participates in the mining so that he/she earns a reward by creating a new block earlier than other miners. We formulate this decision-making…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2020-12-15 Kosuke Toda , Naomi Kuze , Toshimitsu Ushio

Currently, miners typically join mining pools to solve cryptographic puzzles together, and mining pools are in high competition. This has led to the development of several attack strategies such as block withholding (BWH) and fork after…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2019-09-02 Yujin Kwon , Hyoungshick Kim , Yung Yi , Yongdae Kim

Bitcoin's (BTC) Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) has been a source of vulnerability for incentive attacks such as selfish mining, block withholding and coin hopping strategies. In this paper, first, we rigorously study the short-term…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-03-24 Mustafa Doger , Sennur Ulukus