Estimation of Miner Hash Rates and Consensus on Blockchains (draft)
This provides merchants with real-time tools to assess double-spend attack threats on proof-of-work blockchains, representing an incremental improvement in blockchain monitoring.
The paper tackles the problem of quantifying real-time hash rates and consensus on blockchains, showing that hash values of blocks can estimate miner hash rates with quantifiable accuracy, applied to Ethereum and Bitcoin, and that including partial proof-of-work status reports improves accuracy at a slight bandwidth cost.
We make several contributions that quantify the real-time hash rate and therefore the consensus of a blockchain. We show that by using only the hash value of blocks, we can estimate and measure the hash rate of all miners or individual miners, with quanti able accuracy. We apply our techniques to the Ethereum and Bitcoin blockchains; our solution applies to any proof-of-work-based blockchain that relies on a numeric target for the validation of blocks. We also show that if miners regularly broadcast status reports of their partial proof-of- work, the hash rate estimates are signi cantly more accurate at a cost of slightly higher bandwidth. Whether using only the blockchain, or the additional information in status reports, merchants can use our techniques to quantify in real-time the threat of double-spend attacks.