FC 2014: Financial Cryptography and Data Security pp 161-162 | Cite as
One Weird Trick to Stop Selfish Miners: Fresh Bitcoins, A Solution for the Honest Miner (Poster Abstract)
Conference paper
First Online:
Abstract
In “Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable”, Eyal and Sirer study a Bitcoin mining strategy called selfish mining [1]. Under selfish mining, miners strategically withhold blocks to cheat Bitcoin’s mining incentive system. This represents a ‘tragedy of the commons’ in which selfish behavior is incentivized over honest behavior, eventually causing most miners to adopt the selfish strategy, despite it being harmful to Bitcoin [2] as a whole.
Notes
Acknowledgments
We thank Sharon Goldberg for comments and suggestions on drafts of this paper.
References
- 1.Eyal, I., Sirer, E.G.: Majority is not enough: bitcoin mining is vulnerable. arXiv:1311.0243 (2013). http://arxiv.org/abs/1311.0243
- 2.Nakamoto, S.: Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system. The Cryptography Mailing List (2008). http://Bitcoin.org/Bitcoin.pdf
- 3.Rabin, M.: Transaction protection by beacons. J. Comput. Syst. Sci. 27(2), 256–267 (1983). (Elsevier, Amsterdam)MathSciNetCrossRefMATHGoogle Scholar
- 4.Heilman, E.: One Weird Trick to Stop Selfish Miners: Fresh Bitcoins. A Solution for the Honest Miner. Cryptology ePrint Archive, Report 2014/007 (2013). https://eprint.iacr.org/2014/007.pdf
- 5.Iorga, M.: NIST, NIST Randomness Beacon (2013). http://www.nist.gov/itl/csd/ct/nist_beacon.cfm
Copyright information
© IFCA/Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014