## Cryptology ePrint Archive: Report 2015/796

Stubborn Mining: Generalizing Selfish Mining and Combining with an Eclipse Attack

Kartik Nayak and Srijan Kumar and Andrew Miller and Elaine Shi

Abstract: Selfish mining, originally discovered by Eyal et al.~\cite{selfish_mining}, is a well-known attack where a selfish miner, under certain conditions, can gain a disproportionate share of reward by deviating from the honest behavior.

In this paper, we expand the mining strategy space to include novel stubborn'' strategies that, for a large range of parameters, earn the miner more revenue. Consequently, we show that the selfish mining attack is not (in general) optimal.

Further, we show how a miner can further amplify its gain by non-trivially composing mining attacks with network-level eclipse attacks. We show, surprisingly, that given the attacker's best strategy, in some cases victims of an eclipse attack can actually benefit from being eclipsed!

Category / Keywords: Bitcoin, cryptographic protocols, Selfish Mining

Original Publication (with minor differences): IEEE Euro SP 2016

Date: received 8 Aug 2015, last revised 5 Jan 2016

Contact author: kartik at cs umd edu

Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation

Short URL: ia.cr/2015/796

[ Cryptology ePrint archive ]