Smart contracts for bribing miners

Patrick McCorry; Alexander Hicks; Sarah Meiklejohn

Paper 2018/581

Smart contracts for bribing miners

Patrick McCorry, Alexander Hicks, and Sarah Meiklejohn

Abstract

We present three smart contracts that allow a briber to fairly exchange bribes to miners who pursue a mining strategy benefiting the briber. The first contract, CensorshipCon, highlights that Ethereum’s uncle block reward policy can directly subsidise the cost of bribing miners. The second contract, HistoryRevisionCon, rewards miners via an in-band payment for reversing transactions or enforcing a new state of another contract. The third contract, GoldfingerCon, rewards miners in one cryptocurrency for reducing the utility of another cryptocurrency. This work is motivated by the need to understand the extent to which smart contracts can impact the incentive mechanisms involved in Nakamoto-style consensus protocols.

Metadata

Available format(s): PDF
Category: Applications
Publication info: Published elsewhere. Bitcoin Workshop 2018 at Financial Cryptography
Contact author(s): stonecoldpat @ gmail com
History: 2018-06-06: received
Short URL: https://ia.cr/2018/581
License: CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/581,
      author = {Patrick McCorry and Alexander Hicks and Sarah Meiklejohn},
      title = {Smart contracts for bribing miners},
      howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2018/581},
      year = {2018},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/581}
}