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On Profitability of Trailing Mining (1811.09322v1)
Published 22 Nov 2018 in cs.CR and math.PR
Abstract: 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.