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International Conference on Passive and Active Network Measurement

PAM 2015: Passive and Active Measurement pp 290–302Cite as

Exploring Miner Evolution in Bitcoin Network

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Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCCN,volume 8995))

Abstract

In recent years, Bitcoin, a peer-to-peer network based crypto digital currency, has attracted a lot of attentions from the media, the academia, and the general public. A user in Bitcoin network can create Bitcoins by packing and verifying new transactions in the network using their computation power. Driven by the price surge of Bitcoin, users are increasingly investing on expensive specialized hardware for Bitcoin mining. To obtain steady payouts, users also pool their computation resources to conduct pool mining. In this paper, we study the evolution of Bitcoin miners by analyzing the complete transaction blockchain. We characterize how the productivity, computation power and transaction activity of miners evolve over time. We also conduct an in-depth study on the largest mining pool F2Pool. We show how it grows over time and how computation power is distributed among its miners. Finally, we build a simple economic model to explain the evolution of Bitcoin miners.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, New York, USA

    Luqin Wang

  2. Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, NYU Polytechnic School of Engineering, New York, USA

    Yong Liu

Authors
  1. Luqin Wang
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  2. Yong Liu
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Luqin Wang .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Southern California, Marina Del Rey, California, USA

    Jelena Mirkovic

  2. New York University, New York, New York, USA

    Yong Liu

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© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

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Wang, L., Liu, Y. (2015). Exploring Miner Evolution in Bitcoin Network. In: Mirkovic, J., Liu, Y. (eds) Passive and Active Measurement. PAM 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 8995. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_22

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-15509-8_22

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-15508-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-15509-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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