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A Deep Dive into Bitcoin Mining Pools

Title: A Deep Dive into Bitcoin Mining Pools
Authors: Romiti, M
Judmayer, A
Zamyatin, A
Halshofer, B
Item Type: Dataset
Abstract: Miners play a key role in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin: they invest substantial computational resources in processing transactions and minting new currency units. It is well known that an attacker controlling more than half of the network’s mining power could manipulate the state of the system at will. While the influence of large mining pools appears evenly split, the actual distribution of mining power within these pools and their economic relationships with other actors remain undisclosed. To this end, we conduct the first in-depth analysis of mining reward distribution within three of the four largest Bitcoin mining pools and examine their cross-pool economic relationships. Our results suggest that individual miners are simultaneously operating across all three pools and that in each analyzed pool a small number of actors (≤ 20) receives over 50% of all BTC payouts. While the extent of an operator’s control over the resources of a mining pool remains an open debate, our findings are in line with previous research, pointing out centralization tendencies in large mining pools and cryptocurrencies in general
Miners play a key role in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin: they invest substantial computational resources in processing transactions and minting new currency units. It is well known that an attacker controlling more than half of the network’s mining power could manipulate the state of the system at will. While the influence of large mining pools appears evenly split, the actual distribution of mining power within these pools and their economic relationships with other actors remain undisclosed. To this end, we conduct the first in-depth analysis of mining reward distribution within three of the four largest Bitcoin mining pools and examine their cross-pool economic relationships. Our results suggest that individual miners are simultaneously operating across all three pools and that in each analyzed pool a small number of actors (≤ 20) receives over 50% of all BTC payouts. While the extent of an operator’s control over the resources of a mining pool remains an open debate, our findings are in line with previous research, pointing out centralization tendencies in large mining pools and cryptocurrencies in general
Issue Date: 25-Jun-2019
URI: http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/71673
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3256313
Copyright Statement: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode
Keywords: Bitcoin
Mining
Pools
Notes: Dataset retrieved and used with the code hosted at https://github.com/MatteoRomiti/Deep_Dive_BTC_Mining_Pools for the paper https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.05999 published at WEIS 2019 https://weis2019.econinfosec.org/
Appears in Collections:Faculty of Engineering - Research Data