Welcome to the resource topic for 2025/1428
Title:
Strategic Mining in Proof-of-Stake with Practical Random Election
Authors: Zhuo Cai
Abstract:The security of blockchain systems relies on the honest ma-
jority assumption. However, strategic mining threatens this assumption,
because selfish miners can gain more block rewards than honest miners
by attacks such as withholding blocks. Due to its significant implica-
tion, blockchain mining games have been studied in PoW and PoS under
various settings using different methods. Nonetheless, this paper argues
that the practical limitation of random beacons has not been exploited
in strategic mining in PoS blockchains.
Current PoS blockchains use random beacons to randomly select valida-
tors for each slots. However, the randomness is usually fixed for multiple
slots, due to the latency of distributed random beacon protocols. This
indicates that validators actually know some information about the elec-
tion result in the future, which contrasts with the Markov process models
in previous analysis. Using this information, this paper presents a close
to optimal mining strategy based on an optimal interval scheduling algo-
rithm for each epoch. For proof-of-stake protocols with no propagation
delay, we show that a validator with arbitrary proportion of stake can
strictly benefit from strategic mining and get significantly higher block
rewards than the previous strategies.
ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2025/1428
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