An Empirical Evaluation of Selfish Mining and Strategic Mining in Proof-of-Work Blockchain with Multiple Miners
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Nowadays, Bitcoin and Proof-of-Work blockchain systems are becoming prominent and incorporated in many applications and multi-agent systems. Despite their wide applications, the security of such systems is not entirely guaranteed even if half of the total hash rate is held by non-malicious miners. Particularly, Selfish mining strategy (Eyal and Sirer, 2014) which could disrupt the economy of Bitcoin mining has not been studied in the context of multiple miners. Our empirical investigation extends the original study by accounting for multiple Selfish miners (who always use Selfish mining strategy) and multiple strategic miners (who choose a mining strategy to maximise their individual mining reward.) We show that the number of miners in the system is as important as the distribution of hash rate among miners and Selfish mining can be prevented in the presence of multiple miners.
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