A New Outlook on the Profitability of Rogue Mining Strategies in the Bitcoin Network [post]

Yorgos Protonotarios, Pantelis Tassopoulos
2022 unpublished
Many of the recent works on the profitability of rogue mining strategies hinge on a parameter called gamma (γ) that measures the proportion of the honest network attracted by the attacker to mine on top of his fork. These works, see [6] and [5], have surmised conclusions based on premises that erroneously treat γ to be constant. In this paper, we treat γ as a stochastic process and attempt to find its distribution through a Markov analysis. We begin by making strong assumptions on gamma's
more » ... our and proceed to translate them mathematically in order to apply them in a Markov setting. The aforementioned is executed in two separate occasions for two different models. Furthermore, we model the Bitcoin network and numerically derive a limiting distribution whereby the relative accuracy of our models is tested through a likelihood analysis. Finally, we conclude that even with control of 20% of the total hashrate, honest mining is the strongly dominant strategy.
doi:10.21203/rs.3.rs-2195729/v1 fatcat:xkhanz3zovguxfh2twdj24ey6e