2022/04/05 by Yifan Mao, Mao, Yifan, Shaileshh Bojja Venkatakrishnan +1
Computer Science · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Caching and Content Delivery #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Networking and Internet Architecture (cs.NI)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2204.02461
openalex publication_date 2022/04/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application as blocks of a replicated, immutable ledger using a consensus protocol over the Internet. Mining blocks has become lucrative in recent years; e.g., a miner receives over USD 200,000 per mined block in Bitcoin today. A key factor affecting mining rewards, is the latency of broadcasting blocks over the network. In this paper, we consider the problem of topology design for optimizing mining rewards in a wide-area blockchain network that uses a Proof-of-Work protocol for consensus. Contrary to general wisdom that a faster network is always better for miners, we show a counter intuitive result where a slower network is actually beneficial to some miners. This is because competing miners must choose neighbors that not only decrease their own latency to others, but also ensure that the latency between other miners do not decrease because of itself. We formalize this problem, and provide both theoretical analysis and experimental results to support our claim.