Selfish Mining and Dyck Words in Bitcoin and Ethereum Networks
This work provides a simplified analytical method for understanding and evaluating selfish mining attacks, which is an incremental improvement for researchers and practitioners in blockchain security.
The authors tackled the problem of analyzing selfish mining strategies in Bitcoin and Ethereum by developing a direct approach using Dyck words and elementary probabilities to compute long-term apparent hashrates, avoiding complex methods like Markov chains or Poisson processes.
The main goal of this article is to present a direct approach for the formula giving the long-term apparent hashrates of Selfish Mining strategies using only elementary probabilities and combinatorics, more precisely, Dyck words. We can avoid computing stationary probabilities on Markov chain, nor stopping times for Poisson processes as in previous analysis. We do apply these techniques to other block withholding strategies in Bitcoin, and then, we consider also selfish mining in Ethereum.