One Weird Trick to Stop Selfish Miners: Fresh Bitcoins, A Solution for the Honest Miner (Poster Abstract)

In “Majority is not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable”, Eyal and Sirer study a Bitcoin mining strategy called selfish mining [1]. Under selfish mining, miners strategically withhold blocks to cheat Bitcoin’s mining incentive system. This represents a ‘tragedy of the commons’ in which selfish behavior is incentivized over honest behavior, eventually causing most miners to adopt the selfish strategy, despite it being harmful to Bitcoin [2] as a whole.