Resisting Selfish Mining Attacks in the Bicomp

TL;DR

This paper analyzes how the Bicomp protocol can be adjusted to resist selfish mining attacks, which threaten blockchain integrity, by tuning macroblock difficulties and tenure lengths.

Contribution

It provides a detailed derivation of conditions for selfish miners to profit and demonstrates how parameter adjustments enhance Bicomp's resistance.

Findings

Adjusting macroblock difficulties increases resistance to selfish mining.

Longer tenure lengths reduce profitability of selfish mining.

Bicomp protocol shows high resilience against selfish attacks.

Abstract

Selfish mining, which is an attack on the integrity of the Bitcoin network, was first proposed by Cornell researchers Emin Gun Sirer and Ittay Eyal in 2013. Selfish mining attack also exists in most Nakamoto consensus protocols. Generally speaking, selfish mining strategy can comprise a Nakamoto consensus system with less than 25% mining power of the whole system. We have discussed how the Bicomp can resist selfish mining in our former paper "Bicomp: A Bilayer Scalable Nakamoto Consensus Protocol". In this technical report, we give a detailed derivation on the conditions a selfish attacker should meet to earn more revenues through selfish mining. And we also get a conclusion that through adjusting macroblock difficulties together with tenure lengths, the Bicomp protocol has high resistant towards selfish mining.