Paper 2014/007 Original: eprint.iacr.org/2014/007 ↗

One Weird Trick to Stop Selfish Miners: Fresh Bitcoins, A Solution for the Honest Miner.

Ethan Heilman
Abstract

Abstract—A recent result in Bitcoin is the selfish mining strategy in which a selfish cartel withholds blocks they mine to gain an advantage. This strategy is both incentive-compatible and harmful to Bitcoin. In this paper we introduce a new defense against selfish mining that improves on the previous best result, we raise the threshold of mining power necessary to profitably selfishly mine from 25% to 32% under all propagation advantages. While the security of our system uses unforgeable timestamps, it is robust to their compromise. Additionally, we discuss the difficulty a mining conspiracy would face attempting to keep the compromise of our scheme secret and we analyze incentives for getting miners to adopt these changes.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Publication info
Preprint.
History
2014-04-04: last updated
2014-01-05: published
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2014/007
License
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2014/007,
      author = {Ethan Heilman},
      title = {One Weird Trick to Stop Selfish Miners: Fresh Bitcoins, A Solution for the Honest Miner.},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2014/007},
      year = {2014},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/007}
}
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