International Association for Cryptologic Research

International Association
for Cryptologic Research

IACR News item: 10 August 2015

Kartik Nayak, Srijan Kumar, Andrew Miller, Elaine Shi
ePrint Report ePrint Report
Selfish mining is a well-known attack where a selfish miner, under certain conditions, can gain a disproportionate share of reward by deviating from the honest behavior.

In this paper, we greatly expand the mining strategy space, and consider a class of stubborn mining strategies where a miner performs better by taking long shot gambles. Consequently, we show that the selfish mining attack is not optimal for a large parameter region.

Further, we show how a miner can further amplify its gain by non-trivially composing mining attacks and network-level attacks. We show that surprisingly, in some strategies desirable for the adversary, victims of an eclipse attack can actually benefit from being eclipsed!

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