Hopping-Proof and Fee-Free Pooled Mining in Blockchain

TL;DR

This paper introduces a novel, fee-free pooled mining scheme that uses zero-determinant theory to prevent pool-hopping attacks, ensuring fairness and long-term sustainability for miners and pools.

Contribution

It proposes the first hopping-proof pooled mining scheme that is fee-free, widely applicable, and fair, using zero-determinant theory to incentivize honest participation.

Findings

The scheme effectively prevents pool-hopping attacks.

The scheme is applicable to both prepaid and postpaid mining mechanisms.

Theoretical and experimental results confirm its effectiveness.

Abstract

The pool-hopping attack casts down the expected profits of both the mining pool and honest miners in Blockchain. The mainstream countermeasures, namely PPS (pay-per-share) and PPLNS (pay-per-last-N-share), can hedge pool hopping, but pose a risk to the pool as well as the cost to miners. In this study, we apply the zero-determinant (ZD) theory to design a novel pooled mining which offers an incentive mechanism for motivating non-memorial and memorial evolutionary miners not to switch in pools strategically. In short, our hopping-proof pooled mining has three unique features: 1) fee-free. No fee is charged if the miner does not hop. 2) wide applicability. It can be employed in both prepaid and postpaid mechanisms. 3) fairness. Even the pool can dominate the game with any miner, he has to cooperate when the miner does not hop among pools. The fairness of our scheme makes it have long-term sustainability. To the best of our knowledge, we are the first to propose a hopping-proof pooled mining with the above three natures simultaneously. Both theoretical and experimental analyses demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme.