Pooled Mining Makes Selfish Mining Tricky

Suhyeon Lee; Seungjoo Kim

Paper 2018/1230

Pooled Mining Makes Selfish Mining Tricky

Suhyeon Lee and Seungjoo Kim

Abstract

Bitcoin, the first successful cryptocurrency, uses the blockchain structure and PoW mechanism to generate blocks. PoW makes an adversary difficult to control the network until she retains over 50\% of the hashrate of the total network. Another cryptocurrency, Ethereum, also uses this mechanism and it did not make problem before. In PoW research, however, several attack strategies are studied. In this paper, we researched selfish mining in the pooled mining environment and found the pooled mining exposes mining information of the block which adversary is mining to the random miners. Using this leaked information, other miners can exploit the selfish miner. At the same time, the adversary loses revenue than when she does honest mining. Because of the existence of our counter method, the adversary with pooled mining cannot do selfish mining easily on Bitcoin or blockchains using PoW.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Applications
Publication info: Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords: blockchain
Contact author(s): orion-alpha @ korea ac kr
History: 2018-12-30: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2018/1230
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/1230,
      author = {Suhyeon Lee and Seungjoo Kim},
      title = {Pooled Mining Makes Selfish Mining Tricky},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2018/1230},
      year = {2018},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/1230}
}