2023/09/21 by Patrik Keller, Keller, Patrik
Pharmacology, Toxicology and Pharmaceutics · #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Distributed #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Forensic Toxicology and Drug Analysis #Parallel #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2309.11924
openalex publication_date 2023/09/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Selfish Mining is strategic rule-breaking to maximize rewards in proof-of-work protocols [3] and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the preferred tool for finding optimal strategies in Bitcoin [4, 10] and similar linear chain protocols [12]. Protocols increasingly adopt non-sequential chain structures [11], for which MDP analysis is more involved [2]. To date, researchers have tailored specific attack spaces for each protocol [2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12]. Assumptions differ, and validating and comparing results is difficult. To overcome this, we propose a generic attack space that supports a wide range of DAG protocols, including Ethereum, Fruitchains, and Parallel Proof-of-Work. Our approach is modular: we specify each protocol as one program, and then derive the Selfish Mining MDPs automatically.