Analysis of Selfish Miner Behavior in the Bitcoin Network

Abstract

Selfish mining is a recognized misbehaving attack in Bitcoin. Selfish miners intentionally delay the release of newly mined blocks with the goal of gaining more revenue. While several studies have been devoted to analyzing the selfish miner behavior, the impact of selfish behavior on Bitcoin network performance has received little to no attention at all. In this work, we focus on that impact using a Markov chain that models selfish behavior both from the aspect of mining and form the aspect of block distribution time. We find that blocks mined by honest miners undergo longer distribution time compared to blocks mined by selfish miners. This delay results in intentional forking and the resulting network inconsistency provides more opportunity for selfish miners to gain unfair revenue.