Selfish Mining Attack in Bitcoin

Speaker/Bio

Anas Imtiaz is a second year Ph.D. candidate working in NISLab under the supervision of Prof. Starobinski. His current research work looks into the presence and effects of churn in the Bitcoin network, and solutions to mitigate issues caused by churn.

Abstract

In this talk, I will introduce the concept of selfish mining in Bitcoin, proposed by Eyal and Sirer [1]. The authors show that by withholding the blocks that they create, miners in the Bitcoin network can achieve revenues larger than their fair share. They propose a solution to this problem. Sompolinsky et al. [2] argue that there exist more optimal selfish mining strategies than presented by Eyal and Sirer. They investigate the minimal fraction of resources required for a profitable selfish mining attack. Gobel et al. [3] study the feasibility of the attack under propagation delays in the network.

Ref

• [1] Eyal, Ittay, and Emin Gün Sirer. "Majority is not enough: Bitcoin mining is vulnerable." Communications of the ACM 61.7 (2018): 95-102.
• [2] Sapirshtein, Ayelet, Yonatan Sompolinsky, and Aviv Zohar. "Optimal selfish mining strategies in bitcoin." International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg, 2016.
• [3] Göbel, Johannes, et al. "Bitcoin blockchain dynamics: The selfish-mine strategy in the presence of propagation delay." Performance Evaluation 104 (2016): 23-41.