Efficient MDP Analysis for Selfish-Mining in Blockchains
Roi Zur, Ittay Eyal, Aviv Tamar · 2020
A proof of work (PoW) blockchain protocol distributes rewards to its participants, called miners, according to their share of the total computational power. Sufficiently large miners can perform selfish mining -- deviate from the protocol to gain more than their fair share. Such systems are thus secure if all miners are smaller than a threshold size so their best response is following the protocol.