“Resistance to block retention,” by Cyril Grunspan and Ricardo Pérez-Marco.

In a scientific paper published yesterday in arxiv.orgCyril Grunspan ^[1] and Ricardo Pérez-Marco ^[2] demonstrate that a small modification of the Bitcoin protocol would make it consistent with the interests of miners.

The two mathematicians advocate taking into account the production of orphan blocks in the difficulty adjustment formula to ensure that the honest strategy advocated by Satoshi Nakamoto-which consists of always mining in the last block of the time chain – Which is the most profitable mining strategy.

“It has long been known that the Nakamoto consensus, as implemented in the Bitcoin protocol, is not fully aligned with the individual interests of participants. In particular, it has been shown that block-holding strategies can exploit the protocol’s difficulty adjustment algorithm and gain an unfair advantage. However, we show that a modification of the difficulty adjustment formula taking into account orphan blocks makes honest mining the only optimal strategy. Surprisingly, this is still true when orphan blocks are rewarded with an amount lower than the official block reward. This provides an incentive to report orphan blocks. The results are independent of the connectivity of the attacker.”

Article: Blocking resistance to retention. by Cyril Grunspan and Ricardo Perez-Marco

^[1] Head of the Financial Engineering Department of theLeonardo da Vinci School of Engineering.

^[2] Director of research at the CNRS.