BITCOIN SELFISH MINING AND DYCK WORDS

Cyril Grunspan (1) , Ricardo Pérez-Marco (2)

1 ESILV - École Supérieure d'Ingénierie Léonard de Vinci
2 IMJ-PRG (UMR_7586) - Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu - Paris Rive Gauche

We give a straightforward proof for the formula giving the long-term apparent hashrate of the Selfish Mining strategy in Bitcoin using only elementary probabilities and combinatorics, and more precisely, Dyck words. There is no need to compute stationary probabilities on Markov chain nor stopping times for Poisson processes as it was previously done. We consider also several other block withholding strategies.

Domaines: Probabilités [math.PR]; Cryptographie et sécurité [cs.CR]

Cyril Grunspan, Ricardo Pérez-Marco. BITCOIN SELFISH MINING AND DYCK WORDS. 2019. ⟨hal-02334530⟩