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Related papers: When Should Selfish Miners Double-Spend?

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We revisit the fundamental question of Bitcoin's security against double spending attacks. While previous work has bounded the probability that a transaction is reversed, we show that no such guarantee can be effectively given if the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2016-06-01 Yonatan Sompolinsky , Aviv Zohar

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

Mining blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol is well-known to be resource-consuming. A miner bears the operational cost, mainly electricity consumption and IT gear, of mining, and is compensated by a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-10-27 Hansjoerg Albrecher , Pierre-Olivier Goffard

Blockchains are intended to be immutable, so an attacker who is able to delete transactions through a chain reorganization (a malicious reorg) can perform a profitable double-spend attack. We study the rate at which an attacker can execute…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-09-14 Michael Neuder , Daniel J. Moroz , Rithvik Rao , David C. Parkes

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

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

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-12 Roozbeh Sarenche , Svetla Nikova , Bart Preneel

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 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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-02-07 Cyril Grunspan , Ricardo Perez-Marco

GHOST, like the longest-chain protocol, is a chain selection protocol and its capability in resisting selfish mining attack has been validated in imperfect blockchains of Bitcoin and its variants (Bitcoin-like). This paper explores an…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-02-02 Haoran Zhu , Xiaolin Chang , Jelena Mišić , Vojislav B. Mišić , Lei Han , Zhi Chen

In this paper we revisit some major orthodoxies which lie at the heart of the bitcoin crypto currency and its numerous clones. In particular we look at The Longest Chain Rule, the monetary supply policies and the exact mechanisms which…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2014-12-11 Nicolas T. Courtois

Nakamoto double spend strategy, described in Bitcoin foundational article, leads to total ruin with positive probability and does not make sense from the profitability point of view. The simplest strategy that can be profitable incorporates…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-02-24 Cyril Grunspan , Ricardo Pérez-Marco

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

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2015-07-24 Ayelet Sapirshtein , Yonatan Sompolinsky , Aviv Zohar

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-05-09 Krishnendu Chatterjee , Amirali Ebrahimzadeh , Mehrdad Karrabi , Krzysztof Pietrzak , Michelle Yeo , Đorđe Žikelić

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

Researchers have discovered a series of theoretical attacks against Bitcoin's Nakamoto consensus; the most damaging ones are selfish mining, double-spending, and consistency delay attacks. These attacks have one common cause: block…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-12-04 Jianyu Niu , Fangyu Gai , Runchao Han , Ren Zhang , Yinqian Zhang , Chen Feng

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-11-21 Qianlan Bai , Xinyan Zhou , Xing Wang , Yuedong Xu , Xin Wang , Qingsheng Kong

Theoretical guarantees for double spending probabilities for the Nakamoto consensus under the $k$-deep confirmation rule have been extensively studied for zero/bounded network delays and fixed mining rates. In this paper, we introduce a…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-04-30 Mustafa Doger , Sennur Ulukus , Nail Akar

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-05-01 Patrik Keller