Preventing Selfish Mining in Public Blockchain Using Alarming Block and Block Interval Time Approach

Abstract

Selfish mining is a cryptocurrency mining process where a miner keeps a block private for a certain period instead of publishing it to the network. This process allows dishonest miners to create a different blockchain while others keep building on the previous one. When the private block gets published, the honest miners may find the private block higher than the actual one and start building on it. It can lead dishonest miners to have more revenue than their fair share. This research work proposes a selfish mining prevention mechanism, especially for public and permissionless blockchain by using three unique concepts: (i) Threshold Time, (ii) Alarming Block, and (iii) Block Interval Time. Our technique utilizes the timestamp of block generation time and publication time, which are used to calculate the Block Interval Time for every single block. Moreover, a new type of block named Alarming Block, which does not contain any transactions except the block header, is exploited along with the Block Interval Time to discard the selfish blocks, which are kept private for a certain amount of time.