On Profitability of Trailing Mining

Abstract

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.