Bitcoin’s approach to solving the double spending problem is to make a collusion and attack on the network prohibitively expensive. One of the main factors that will determine Bitcoin’s chance of survival in the long-term is whether the behavior that maximizes the profits of miners contributes to or sabotages the health of the network.

The game theory that determines this is complex and our understanding of it still incomplete. But research is increasing and two people who have been at the forefront of this work are , a professor in computer science at Cornell University, and Ittay Eyal, a post-doc at the same department.

They joined us for a fascinating discussion of their work on ‘selfish mining’, the incetive structure that underlies Bitcoin and their recent positive conclusions from the Miner’s Dilemma.

Topics covered in this episode:

Emin Gün Sirer’s early interest in cryptocurrencies and work on a cryptocurrency to incentivize bittorrent users in 2004

What selfish mining is and how miners could profit from withholding blocks

How an attacker would execute a selfish mining attack

Why the miner’s dilemma implies that the equilibrium might be small mining pools

Why the lack of security of clients and servers is holding back adoption

Episode links:

Selfish Mining paper (PDF)

Miner's Dilemma blog post

Miner's Dilemma paper (PDF)

Hacking, Distributed

Meni Rosenfeld's paper on mining pool reward systems (PDF)

This episode is hosted by Brian Fabian Crain and Sébastien Couture. Show notes and listening options: epicenter.tv/076