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International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security

FC 2019: Financial Cryptography and Data Security pp 527–549Cite as

Echoes of the Past: Recovering Blockchain Metrics from Merged Mining

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 11598))

Abstract

So far, the topic of merged mining has mainly been considered in a security context, covering issues such as mining power centralization or cross-chain attack scenarios. In this work we show that key information for determining blockchain metrics such as the fork rate can be recovered through data extracted from merge mined cryptocurrencies. Specifically, we reconstruct a long-ranging view of forks and stale blocks in Bitcoin from its merge mined child chains, and compare our results to previous findings that were derived from live measurements. Thereby, we show that live monitoring alone is not sufficient to capture a large majority of these events, as we are able to identify a non-negligible portion of stale blocks that were previously unaccounted for. Their authenticity is ensured by cryptographic evidence regarding both, their position in the respective blockchain, as well as the Proof-of-Work difficulty.

Furthermore, by applying this new technique to Litecoin and its child cryptocurrencies, we are able to provide the first extensive view and lower bound on the stale block and fork rate in the Litecoin network. Finally, we outline that a recovery of other important metrics and blockchain characteristics through merged mining may also be possible.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    We exclude attacks such as selfish mining [4] and possible countermeasures [18] in this example to simplify the discussion.

  2. 2.

    In Bitcoin core [24] the RPC command getchaintips can be used to list all forks and stale blocks the local node knows of.

  3. 3.

    Assuming the miner follows the protocol rule of extending the longest chain it knows of.

  4. 4.

    In Litecoin and its children this validation is not possible because a DSHA256 hash of the block header is used for linking, instead of the scrypt hash used for the PoW.

  5. 5.

    We also validated if the AuxPoW actually meets the difficulty encoded in the child.

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Acknowledgments

We thank Georg Merzdovnik as well as the participants of Dagstuhl Seminar 18152 “Blockchains, Smart Contracts and Future Applications” for valuable discussions and insights. We thank Christian Decker, Roger Wattenhofer, Till Neudecker, Blockchain.com and chainz.cryptoid.info for the live monitoring data they kindly provided. This research was funded by Bridge Early Stage 846573 A2Bit, Bridge 1 858561 SESC, Bridge 1 864738 PR4DLT (all FFG), the Christian Doppler Laboratory for Security and Quality Improvement in the Production System Lifecycle (CDL-SQI), Institute of Information Systems Engineering, TU Wien, Blockchain.com and the competence center SBA-K1 funded by COMET. The financial support by the Christian Doppler Research Association, the Austrian Federal Ministry for Digital and Economic Affairs and the National Foundation for Research, Technology and Development is gratefully acknowledged.

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. SBA Research, Vienna, Austria

    Nicholas Stifter, Philipp Schindler, Aljosha Judmayer, Alexei Zamyatin, Andreas Kern & Edgar Weippl

  2. Imperial College London, London, UK

    Alexei Zamyatin

  3. Christian Doppler Laboratory for Security and Quality Improvement in the Production System Lifecycle (CDL-SQI), Institute of Information Systems Engineering, TU Wien, Vienna, Austria

    Nicholas Stifter & Edgar Weippl

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  1. Nicholas Stifter
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  2. Philipp Schindler
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  3. Aljosha Judmayer
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Correspondence to Nicholas Stifter .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Cheriton School of Computer Science, University of Waterloo, Waterloo, ON, Canada

    Ian Goldberg

  2. Tandy School of Computer Science, University of Tulsa, Tulsa, USA

    Tyler Moore

A Appendix

A Appendix

Table 1. Considered blockchain data of merge mined cryptocurrencies and their parents
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Table 2. Considered live monitoring data for Bitcoin and Litecoin
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Table 3. Comparison of total stale blocks in Bitcoin observed by different live monitoring sources and merged mining
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1.1 A.1 Bitcoin Total Number of Stale Blocks for Different Data Sources

Table 3 shows both, the total number of unique stale blocks exclusive to the data source, as well as the overall number of (non-duplicate) stale blocks it contains.

1.2 A.2 Litecoin Stale Block Rate Comparison

Fig. 9.
figure 9

Stale block rate recovered from merged mining in Litecoin compared to available live measurements [26]; 5 difficulty epochs grouped together

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Table 4. Structure of the coinbase of a merge-mined block [30]
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As we have previously outlined in Subsect. 5.3, the live monitoring data we were able to obtain for Litecoin was relatively limited and only contained 223 stale blocks/forks. Nevertheless, we plot this live monitoring data against the recovered stale blocks through merged mining in Fig. 9 and show that the data sets also contain some overlap. Again, our recovered data only contains stale blocks that can be cryptographically linked to the canonical Litecoin chain and which meet the prescribed difficulty target (Table 4).

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Stifter, N., Schindler, P., Judmayer, A., Zamyatin, A., Kern, A., Weippl, E. (2019). Echoes of the Past: Recovering Blockchain Metrics from Merged Mining. In: Goldberg, I., Moore, T. (eds) Financial Cryptography and Data Security. FC 2019. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 11598. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32101-7_31

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