A Deep Dive into Bitcoin Mining Pools: An Empirical Analysis of Mining Shares
Matteo Romiti, Aljosha Judmayer, Alexei Zamyatin, Bernhard Haslhofer

TL;DR
This paper provides an empirical analysis of Bitcoin mining pools, revealing centralization tendencies and distribution patterns of mining rewards among key actors within the pools.
Contribution
It is the first detailed study of reward distribution and economic relationships within major Bitcoin mining pools, highlighting centralization issues.
Findings
Small number of actors receive over 50% of payouts
Miners operate across multiple pools
Centralization tendencies in large pools
Abstract
Miners play a key role in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin: they invest substantial computational resources in processing transactions and minting new currency units. It is well known that an attacker controlling more than half of the network's mining power could manipulate the state of the system at will. While the influence of large mining pools appears evenly split, the actual distribution of mining power within these pools and their economic relationships with other actors remain undisclosed. To this end, we conduct the first in-depth analysis of mining reward distribution within three of the four largest Bitcoin mining pools and examine their cross-pool economic relationships. Our results suggest that individual miners are simultaneously operating across all three pools and that in each analyzed pool a small number of actors (<= 20) receives over 50% of all BTC payouts. While the…
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Taxonomy
TopicsBlockchain Technology Applications and Security · Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance · Spam and Phishing Detection
