Mitigation of selfish mining attack using dynamic difficulty adjustment algorithm

doi:10.1007/s12083-025-02064-y

Mitigation of selfish mining attack using dynamic difficulty adjustment algorithm

2025-07-07

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DOI：10.1007/s12083-025-02064-y

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Bitcoin relies on the majority of miners honestly following Bitcoin’s protocol to ensure a fair distribution of revenue. However, it has been observed that the colluding miners who follow the selfish-mine strategy obtain larger revenue than their fair share. The selfish miners manipulate the difficulty value of the Bitcoin network. With a manipulated difficulty value, the selfish miners increase their revenue by decreasing the revenue of the honest miners. Conventional Difficulty Adjustment Algorithms (DAAs) mitigate the selfish mining attacks by increasing the Profitability Waiting Time (PWT). When the PWT for a selfish miner increases, it increases the risk associated with selfish mining because the selfish miners need to publish their blocks before the honest miners. If the honest miners publish the blocks that invalidate the selfish miners’ hidden blocks, then selfish miners will end up having no revenue. Thus, it reduces the attractiveness of following a selfish-mine strategy. Although conventional DAAs increase the selfish miners’ PWT, there is a way to increase the PWT even further. In this article, we propose a Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DDAA) that discourages the selfish miners by increasing their PWT. We analyze and compare the proposed algorithm with conventional DAAs. To the best of our knowledge, the proposed DDAA is the first algorithm that discourages selfish miners by significantly extending the PWT. In particular, when a mining pool with 45% hash rate adopts a selfish-mine strategy, takes around 650 hours, 900 hours, and 1850 hours to become profitable with Bitcoin’s DAA, Zeno’s DAA, and proposed DDAA, respectively. Hence, the proposed DDAA increases the PWT by 286% and 206% as compared to the Bitcoin’s DAA and Zeno’s DAA, respectively. The proposed DDAA lowers the Block Generation Rate (BGR), which in turn decreases the revenue of the selfish and honest miners. However, we discuss that the decrease in revenue due to the lower BGR is insignificant as compared to the discouraging selfish miners.

Keywords:

Bitcoin

Blockchain

Selfish mining pool

Difficulty adjustment algorithm

Mitigation of selfish mining attack using dynamic difficulty adjustment algorithm

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