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Related papers: Selfish Mining under General Stochastic Rewards

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We compute and compare profitabilities of stubborn mining strategies that are variations of selfish mining. These are deviant mining strategies violating Bitcoin's network protocol rules. We apply the foundational set-up from our previous…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-08-06 Cyril Grunspan , Ricardo Pérez-Marco

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

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

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

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 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

We develop a dynamic model of the Bitcoin market where users set fees themselves and miners decide whether to operate and whom to validate based on those fees. Our analysis reveals how, in equilibrium, users adjust their bids in response to…

Theoretical Economics · Economics 2025-02-24 Yuichiro Kamada , Shunya Noda

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-08-13 Fabian Ritz , Alf Zugenmaier

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

In the Bitcoin system, participants are rewarded for solving cryptographic puzzles. In order to receive more consistent rewards over time, some participants organize mining pools and split the rewards from the pool in proportion to each…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-09-14 Yujin Kwon , Dohyun Kim , Yunmok Son , Eugene Vasserman , Yongdae Kim

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2016-03-17 Jonathan Harvey-Buschel , Can Kisagun

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

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

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

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-27 Roi Bar-Zur , Aviv Tamar , Ittay Eyal

Bitcoin-NG is among the first blockchain protocols to approach the \emph{near-optimal} throughput by decoupling blockchain operation into two planes: leader election and transaction serialization. Its decoupling idea has inspired a new…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Jianyu Niu , Ziyu Wang , Fangyu Gai , Chen Feng

A proof of work (PoW) blockchain protocol distributes rewards to its participants, called miners, according to their share of the total computational power. Sufficiently large miners can perform selfish mining - deviate from the protocol to…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-09-16 Roi Bar-Zur , Ittay Eyal , Aviv Tamar

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…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2025-01-23 Yunshu Liu , Lingjie Duan

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

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2015-05-22 Johannes Göbel , Paul Keeler , Anthony E. Krzesinski , Peter G. Taylor