Modeling Coordinated vs. P2P Mining: An Analysis of Inefficiency and Inequality in Proof-of-Work Blockchains

Abstract: We study efficiency in a proof-of-work blockchain with non-zero latencies, focusing in particular on the (inequality in) individual miners' efficiencies. Prior work attributed differences in miners' efficiencies mostly to attacks, but we pursue a different question: Can inequality in miners' efficiencies be explained by delays, even when all miners are honest? Traditionally, such efficiency-related questions were tackled only at the level of the overall system, and in a peer-to-peer (P2P) setting where miners directly connect to one another. Despite it being common today for miners to pool compute capacities in a mining pool managed by a centralized coordinator, efficiency in such a coordinated setting has barely been studied. In this paper, we propose a simple model of a proof-of-work blockchain with latencies for both the P2P and the coordinated settings. We derive a closed-form expression for the efficiency in the coordinated setting with an arbitrary number of miners and arbitrary latencies, both for the overall system and for each individual miner. We leverage this result to show that inequalities arise from variability in the delays, but that if all miners are equidistant from the coordinator, they have equal efficiency irrespective of their compute capacities. We then prove that, under a natural consistency condition, the overall system efficiency in the P2P setting is higher than that in the coordinated setting. Finally, we perform a simulation-based study to demonstrate that even in the P2P setting delays between miners introduce inequalities, and that there is a more complex interplay between delays and compute capacities.