Is Bitcoin Future as Secure as We Think? Analysis of Bitcoin Vulnerability to Bribery Attacks Launched through Large Transactions

Abstract

Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantees to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker’s computational power does not exceed 50% of the network power. In this article, we design a novel bribery attack and show that this guarantee can be hugely undermined. Miners are assumed to be rational in this setup, and they are given incentives that are dynamically calculated. In this attack, the adversary misuses the Bitcoin protocol to bribe miners and maximize their gained advantage. We will reformulate the bribery attack to propose a general mathematical foundation upon which we build multiple strategies. We show that, unlike Whale Attack, these strategies are practical, especially in the future when halvings lower the mining rewards. In the so-called “guaranteed variable-rate bribing with commitment” strategy, through optimization by Differential Evolution (DE), we show how double-spending is possible in the Bitcoin ecosystem for any transaction whose value is above 218.9BTC, and this comes with 100% success rate. A slight reduction in the success probability, e.g., by 10%, brings the threshold down to 165BTC. If the rationality assumption holds, then this shows how vulnerable blockchain-based systems like Bitcoin are. We suggest a soft fork on Bitcoin to fix this issue at the end.