On Profitability of Trailing Mining
This provides theoretical validation for a specific cryptocurrency mining strategy, though it appears incremental as it confirms prior numerical studies.
The paper analyzed the profitability of the Trail Stubborn mining strategy in Bitcoin compared to other block-withholding approaches, proving it can be profitable under certain parameter conditions despite risks of mining on shorter forks.
We compute the revenue ratio of the Trail Stubborn mining strategy in the Bitcoin network and compare its profitability to other block-withholding strategies. We use for this martingale techniques and a classical analysis of the hiker problem. In this strategy the attacker could find himself mining in a shorter fork, but we prove that for some parameter values it is still profitable to not give up. This confirms previous numerical studies.