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E. Gün Sirer: Bitcoin Is Broken
by mk

    The honest Bitcoin protocol assumes that all miners engage in a benign strategy where they quickly and truthfully share every block they have discovered. Until now, everyone assumed that this was the dominant strategy; no other strategy was known that could result in higher revenues for miners.

    Our work shows that there is an alternative strategy, called Selfish-Mine, that enables a mining pool to make additional money at the risk of hurting the system. In Selfish-Mining, miners keep their block discoveries private to their own pool, and judiciously reveal them to the rest of the honest miners so as to force the honest miners to waste their resources on blocks that are ultimately not part of the blockchain.