Generic Selfish Mining MDP for DAG Protocols

09/21/2023

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by   Patrik Keller, et al.

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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 the wide class of DAG protocols that provide a total ordering of blocks [11], e. g., 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.