2022/10/25 by Tong Cao, Jérémie Decouchant, Cao, Tong +3
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · #Auction Theory and Applications #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Crime, Illicit Activities, and Governance #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Distributed #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2210.14072
openalex publication_date 2022/10/25 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We describe and analyze perishing mining, a novel block-withholding mining strategy that lures profit-driven miners away from doing useful work on the public chain by releasing block headers from a privately maintained chain. We then introduce the dual private chain (DPC) attack, where an adversary that aims at double spending increases its success rate by intermittently dedicating part of its hash power to perishing mining. We detail the DPC attack's Markov decision process, evaluate its double spending success rate using Monte Carlo simulations. We show that the DPC attack lowers Bitcoin's security bound in the presence of profit-driven miners that do not wait to validate the transactions of a block before mining on it.