Bitcoin Selfish Mining and Dyck Words
summary
Paper proves with martingale stopping-time proof that without difficulty adjustment no withholding beats honest mining, then derives exact revenue formulas using Catalan/Dyck-word combinatorics and Poisson-race timing to get revenue-per-time. Results give thresholds and examples: selfish mining can become profitable after difficulty reacts (10% hash with γ=0.9 needs ≈10 weeks), several strategies dominate above ≈30% hash, and for Ethereum best play under 25% is to ignore uncles. Proposal: BIP to include signed orphan blocks in difficulty (hard fork).
AI-written summary · about
chapters (16)
- 0:00Intro
- 0:42Bibliography
- 7:12Block withholding mining
- 9:41Important observations
- 10:31Profitability of block withholding strategies
- 13:25An attack on the difficulty adjustment
- 15:59The Markov model
- 18:19The Martingale model
- 20:06Direct computation of long term profitability
- 21:20Catalan numbers (Euler-Segner numbers)
- 22:46Other definitions of Catalan numbers
- 25:41Selfish Mining and Dyck words
- 28:39Other classical block withholding strategies
- 29:14Comparison of strategies
- 30:05Ethereum mining rewards
- 32:19Conclusions
related talks
50mBitcoin's Incentive Structure
01h 05mIncentive-Compatibility in Blockchains and Mining Pools
29mBitcoin Hashrate Derivatives
34mBitcoin Mining: Navigating the Difficulty
32mAnalysis of Nakamoto Consensus
29mTail Emissions and Demurrage
11mProof of Prudence: Smarter Bitcoin Mining
01h 20mGame Theory Applied to Mining Pools, Token Offering, Dao, and Consensus Protocols