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
Creative Commons Attribution
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},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/581}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/581}
}
Note: In order to protect the privacy of readers, eprint.iacr.org does not use cookies or embedded third party content.