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
-
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}
}
