As the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and today's biggest decentralized platform that runs smart contracts, Ethereum has received much attention from both industry and academia. Nevertheless, there exist very few studies about the security of its mining strategies, especially from the selfish mining perspective. In this paper, we aim to fill this research gap by analyzing selfish mining in Ethereum and understanding its potential threat. First, we introduce a 2-dimensional Markov process to model the behavior of a selfish mining strategy inspired by a Bitcoin mining strategy proposed by Eyal and Sirer. Second, we derive the stationary distribution of our Markov model and compute long-term average mining rewards. This allows us to determine the threshold of computational power that makes selfish mining profitable in Ethereum. We find that this threshold is lower than that in Bitcoin mining (which is 25% as discovered by Eyal and Sirer), suggesting that Ethereum is more vulnerable to selfish mining than Bitcoin.
翻译:作为市场资本化的第二大隐秘货币和今天最大的分散平台,Etherom已经受到产业界和学术界的极大关注。然而,关于采矿战略安全性的研究很少,特别是从自私的采矿角度。在本文中,我们的目标是通过分析Etheem的自私采矿和了解其潜在威胁来填补这一研究差距。首先,我们引入一个二维的Markov进程,以模拟由Eyal和Sirer提出的比特币采矿战略所启发的自私采矿战略的行为。第二,我们从我们Markov模型的固定分布中得出长期平均采矿收益。这使我们能够确定计算能力临界值,使自私的采矿在Ethereum获利。我们发现,这一临界值比比比比特币采矿(Eyal和Sirer发现为25%)的临界值要低,这表明Eceenum比比比比比特币更容易受到自私采矿的伤害。