A survey: Reward distribution mechanisms and withholding attacks in Bitcoin pool mining

Saide Zhu; Wei Li; Hong Li; Chunqiang Hu; Zhipeng Cai

doi:10.3934/mfc.2018020

Article Contents

2018, Volume 1, Issue 4: 393-414. Doi: 10.3934/mfc.2018020

This issue Previous Article Constant competitive algorithms for unbounded one-Way trading under monotone hazard rate Next Article

A survey: Reward distribution mechanisms and withholding attacks in Bitcoin pool mining

1.
Department of Computer Science, Georgia State University, Atlanta, GA, USA
2.
Institute of Information Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, China
3.
School of Big Data & Software Engineering, Chongqing University, Chongqing, China

Corresponding author: Wei Li
Corresponding author: Wei Li

Received: August 2018

Revised: October 2018

Published: December 2018

Abstract / Introduction Full Text(HTML) Figure(9) / Table(1) Related Papers Cited by

Abstract

The past three years have seen the rapid increase of Bitcoin difficulty, which has led to a substantial variance in solo mining. As a result, miners tend to join a large open pool to get a more stable reward. Nowadays, mining pools take up over 98% of Bitcoins total computation power. In a sense, this is a manifestation of Bitcoin that tends to be centralized. Thus, researchers have shown an increased interest in pool mining payoff and security. The purpose of this paper is to review and summarize recent research in Bitcoin pool mining system. We first introduce several common reward distribution schemes, and analyze their advantages and disadvantages with some improvement mechanisms; In the second section, to address pool security problems, we examined the practical utility of some existing and potential attack strategies. To study those malicious attack in details, several defense methods are collected. Finally, we make an outlook on Bitcoin future.

Keywords:

Mathematics Subject Classification: Primary: 58F15, 58F17; Secondary: 53C35.

Citation:

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Figure 1. Proportional Mechanism

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Figure 2. An example of PPLNS Mechanism

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Figure 3. Scenarios of Selfish Mining

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Figure 4. BWH attacker scenario: one attacker

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Figure 5. BWH attacker scenario: two attackers

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Figure 6. Bribe-style BWH attack scenario

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Figure 7. Sponsored BWH Scenario

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Figure 8. Race Competition

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Figure 9. Attacker's dilemma

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Table 1. Reward Mechanism Statistics [53]

Pool Name	Reward Mechanism	PPS fee	Other fee
Antpool	PPLNS & PPS	2.5%	0%
BTC.com	FPPS	0%	4%
Slush Pool	Score		2%
BTCC Pool	PPS	2%	0%
P2Pool	PPLNS		0%
BTCDig	DGM		0%

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