Bitcoin blockchain dynamics: The selfish-mine strategy in the presence of propagation delay

Abstract

In the context of the ‘selfish-mine’ strategy proposed by Eyal and Sirer, we study the effect of communication delay on the evolution of the Bitcoin blockchain. First, we use a simplified Markov model that tracks the contrasting states of belief about the blockchain of a small pool of dishonest miners and the ‘rest of the community’ to establish that the use of block-hiding strategies, such as selfish-mine, causes the rate of production of orphan blocks to increase. Then we use a spatial Poisson process model to study values of Eyal and Sirer’s parameter γ, which denotes the proportion of the honest community that mines on a previously-secret block released by the pool in response to the min..