Competing (Semi-)Selfish Miners in Bitcoin
Francisco J. Marmolejo-Cossío, Eric Brigham, Benjamin Sela, Jonathan I. Katz · 2019
The Bitcoin protocol prescribes certain behavior by the miners who are responsible for maintaining and extending the underlying blockchain; in particular, miners who successfully solve a puzzle, and hence can extend the chain by a block, are supposed to release that block immediately. Eyal and Sirer showed, however, that a selfish miner is incentivized to deviate from the protocol and withhold its blocks under certain conditions.