On Profitability of Trailing Mining

Cyril Grunspan (1) , Ricardo Pérez-Marco (2, 3)

1 ESILV - École Supérieure d'Ingénierie Léonard de Vinci
2 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
3 IMJ-PRG (UMR_7586) - Institut de Mathématiques de Jussieu - Paris Rive Gauche

We compute the revenue ratio of the Trail Stubborn mining strategy in the Bitcoin network and compare its profitability to other block-withholding strategies. We use for this martingale techniques and a classical analysis of the hiker problem. In this strategy the attacker could find himself mining in a shorter fork, but we prove that for some parameter values it is still profitable to not give up. This confirms previous numerical studies.

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

Cyril Grunspan, Ricardo Pérez-Marco. On Profitability of Trailing Mining. 2019. ⟨hal-02334533⟩