Abstract
The increasing number of cryptocurrencies, as well as the rising number of actors within each single cryptocurrency, inevitably leads to tensions between the respective communities. As with open source projects, (protocol) forks are often the result of broad disagreement. Usually, after a permanent fork both communities “mine” their own business and the conflict is resolved. But what if this is not the case? In this paper, we outline the possibility of malicious forking and consensus techniques that aim at destroying the other branch of a protocol fork. Thereby, we illustrate how merged mining can be used as an attack method against a permissionless PoW cryptocurrency, which itself involuntarily serves as the parent chain for an attacking merge mined branch of a hard fork.
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Notes
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The inclusion of a hash value within a block to provably attributed it to the creator of the proof-of-work (PoW) is enough to support merged mining [7].
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This should capture the observation that not all miners immediately perform merged mining if it is possible, even though it would be rational to do so [7].
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Our example, in which \(\mathcal {C}\) wants to increase the block size and \(\mathcal {B}\) does not want to implement any rule change, would resemble such an expanding protocol change.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Georg Merzdovnik and Alexei Zamyatin as well as the participants of Dagstuhl Seminar 18152 “Blockchains, Smart Contracts and Future Applications” for valuable discussions and insights. This research was funded by Bridge Early Stage 846573 A2Bit, Bridge 1 858561 SESC, Bridge 1 864738 PR4DLT (all FFG), CDL-SQI at the Institute of Information Systems Engineering TU Wien, and the competence center SBA-K1 funded by COMET.
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Judmayer, A., Stifter, N., Schindler, P., Weippl, E. (2018). Pitchforks in Cryptocurrencies:. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Herrera-Joancomartí, J., Livraga, G., Rios, R. (eds) Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology. DPM CBT 2018 2018. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11025. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-00305-0_15
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