Optimal Selfish Mining Strategies in Bitcoin

By Ayelet Sapirshtein, Yonatan Sompolinsky, Aviv Zohar. Financial Cryptography, 2015

654 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The Bitcoin protocol requires nodes to quickly distribute newly created blocks. Strong nodes can, however, gain higher payoffs by withholding blocks they create and selectively postponing their publication. The existence of such selfish mining attacks was first reported by Eyal and Sirer, who have demonstrated a specific deviation from the standard protocol (a strategy that we name SM1).

Subfields: Information Systems, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3e77e513b888a1486f8f563656b8db72021b44b7

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Citations in the corpus

Cryptocurrencies Without Proof of Work (2014, background): “Thus, an individual miner who has a fraction p of the total mining power can create each new block with probability ≈ p , though other factors such as “selﬁsh mining” [2,10,11,28] can inﬂuence p .”
Ouroboros: A Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocol (2017, background): “In this way, attacks like block withholding and selfish-mining [10,25] are mitigated by our design.”
SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains (2017, background): “Broadly, incentivization in PoW blockchains has seen some study [86]: major limitations have been identified [41, 61, 106, 119], and possible solutions have been proposed [138].”
REM: Resource-Efficient Mining for Blockchains (2017, background): “Despite their imperfections [26, 35, 37, 65, 71], blockchains [38, 64, 67] have attracted the interest of the ﬁnancial and technology industries [16, 25, 34, 47, 69, 74] as a way to build a transaction systems with distributed trust.”
Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey (2018, background): “[72] shows that there are selfish mining strategies that earn more money and are profitable for smaller miners compared with simple selfish mining.”
Bitcoin price and its marginal cost of production: support for a fundamental value (2018, methodology): “The process and technical elaboration of Bitcoin production (‘mining’) is described at length elsewhere (e.g. Kroll, Davey, and Felten 2013; Sapirshtein, Sompolinsky, and Zohar 2016; Nakamoto 2008).”
Enhancing Bitcoin Security and Performance with Strong Consistency via Collective Signing (2016, background): “An extension of this attack is the so-called stubborn mining [41, 44] which generalizes the idea behind selfish mining to increase the adversaries revenue.”
A Survey of Distributed Consensus Protocols for Blockchain Networks (2019, background): “[80] shows that an optimized selfish mining strategy can further enhance the selfish mining pool’s effective mining power fraction from α to the upper bound α 1−α (achievable when γ = 1).”
An Overview of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Consensus, and Future Trends (2017, background): “[49] shows that there are selfish mining strategies that earn more money and are profitable for smaller miners compared to simple selfish mining.”
On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains (2016, methodology): “Notice that such a strategy is meant as a selfish mining countermeasure, but allows a selfish miner to increase its chances of catching up to the honest chain [31].”
A Survey on Security and Privacy Issues of Bitcoin (2017, background): “Indeed, numerous attacks have been described targeting different aspects of the system, including double spending [2], netsplit [3], transaction malleability [4], networking attacks [5], or attacks targeting mining [6] [7] [8] and mining pools [9].”
A Survey of Blockchain From the Perspectives of Applications, Challenges, and Opportunities (2019, background): “, revealed that even with less than 25% of the computational resources, the attackers can gain from selfish mining [110].”
On the Instability of Bitcoin Without the Block Reward (2016, background): “Other works, notably Sapirshtein et al. [23] have analyzed selﬁsh mining in more detail using Markov Decision Processes (MDP).”
A Survey on Consensus Mechanisms and Mining Strategy Management in Blockchain Networks (2018, methodology): “As an example, the study in [131] considers the honest miners as non-adaptive players following the Nakamoto protocol.”
A Smart Contract for Boardroom Voting with Maximum Voter Privacy (2017, background): “A smaller cartel of miners (< 51%) can potentially delay transactions being accepted into the Blockchain using techniques such as selfish mining [14] [31] or feather forking [29].”
Stubborn Mining: Generalizing Selfish Mining and Combining with an Eclipse Attack (2016, result): “Comparison with Sapirshtein et al.[23] Concurrent to and independent of our work, Sapirshtein et al.[23] also observe that selfish mining is suboptimal.”
Hijacking Bitcoin: Routing Attacks on Cryptocurrencies (2016, methodology): “We also quantify their effectiveness on the current Bitcoin topology using data collected from a Bitcoin supernode combined with BGP routing data.”