Paper 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.

Note: Fixed broken citations.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Contact author(s)
ethan r heilman @ gmail com
History
2014-04-04: last of 2 revisions
2014-01-05: received
See all versions
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2014/007
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

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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