Swimming with fishes and sharks: beneath the surface of queue-based ethereum mining pools
| Autor: | Alexei Zamyatin, Peter G. Harrison, Catherine Mulligan, William J. Knottenbelt, Sam M. Werner, Katinka Wolter |
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| Přispěvatelé: | Blockchain (GB) Limited |
| Rok vydání: | 2017 |
| Předmět: |
Cryptocurrency
Technology Operations research Computer science Hash function Cryptography 02 engineering and technology Engineering Computer Science Theory & Methods 0202 electrical engineering electronic engineering information engineering Queue Block (data storage) 060201 languages & linguistics Science & Technology business.industry Aggregate (data warehouse) InformationSystems_DATABASEMANAGEMENT Engineering Electrical & Electronic 06 humanities and the arts Variance (accounting) ComputingMethodologies_PATTERNRECOGNITION 0602 languages and literature Computer Science 020201 artificial intelligence & image processing business Database transaction |
| Zdroj: | 25th Annual Meeting of the IEEE International Symposium on Modelling, Analysis and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunication Systems MASCOTS |
| Popis: | Cryptocurrency mining can be said to be the modern alchemy, involving as it does the transmutation of electricity into digital gold. The goal of mining is to guess the solution to a cryptographic puzzle, the difficulty of which is determined by the network, and thence to win the block reward and transaction fees. Because the return on solo mining has a very high variance, miners band together to create so-called mining pools. These aggregate the power of several individual miners, and, by distributing the accumulated rewards according to some scheme, ensure a more predictable return for participants. In this paper we formulate a model of the dynamics of a queue- based reward distribution scheme in a popular Ethereum mining pool and develop a corresponding simulation. We show that the underlying mechanism disadvantages miners with above-average hash rates. We then consider two-miner scenarios and show how large miners may perform attacks to increase their profits at the expense of other participants of the mining pool. The outcomes of our analysis show the queue-based reward scheme is vulnerable to manipulation in its current implementation. |
| Databáze: | OpenAIRE |
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