Competitive Selfish Mining

Abstract

Bitcoin mining is the process of generating new blocks in Bitcoin blockchain. This process is vulnerable to different types of attacks. One of the most famous attacks in this category is Selfish Mining, introduced by Eyal and Sirer [1] in 2014. This attack is essentially a strategy that a sufficiently powerful mining pool can follow to obtain more revenue than its fair share. This is a tempting attack to deploy because every pool is trying to increase its revenue and this is an excellent opportunity. However, in most of the works to date, the effect of only one selfish pool has been studied. This is an attempt to analyze selfish mining in a competitive environment, where there are more than one selfish miners in play. To do so, we created a Bitcoin network simulator and used it to simulate different configurations of miners to be able to address this problem. In short, our finding shows that in almost all of the configurations, with the presence of a more powerful selfish miner, selfish mining actually decreases the revenue of the weaker selfish miners and also helps the stronger selfish miner.