On Subversive Miner Strategies and Block Withholding Attack in Bitcoin Digital Currency
Nicolas T. Courtois, Lear Bahack

TL;DR
This paper analyzes miner strategies in Bitcoin, focusing on subversive tactics like block withholding attacks, and introduces a new practical attack that enhances rogue miners' gains, highlighting potential risks to Bitcoin's integrity.
Contribution
It presents a detailed study of dishonest mining strategies and proposes a novel, effective block withholding attack to expose vulnerabilities in Bitcoin's security.
Findings
Recent attack execution confirmed in real-world scenarios
Proposed attack maximizes rogue miners' rewards
Highlights risks of dishonest strategies in Bitcoin network
Abstract
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of creating (minting) the new coins which are later put into circulation. Miners spend electricity on solving cryptographic puzzles and they are also gatekeepers which validate bitcoin transactions of other people. Miners are expected to be honest and have some incentives to behave well. However. In this paper we look at the miner strategies with particular attention paid to subversive and dishonest strategies or those which could put bitcoin and its reputation in danger. We study in details several recent attacks in which dishonest miners obtain a higher reward than their relative contribution to the network. In particular we revisit the concept of…
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Taxonomy
TopicsBlockchain Technology Applications and Security · Cryptography and Data Security · Advanced Steganography and Watermarking Techniques
