Mining Strategies For Completing The Longest Blockchain

With the continuous development of the financial industry and Internet technology,virtual currencies are getting closer to people's lives.As the most high-profile virtual currency,Bitcoin is an innovative distributed cryptocurrency with many advantages such as decentralization,anonymity,and open source.The underlying structure of Bitcoin is the blockchain,which records all transactions in a chain structure,and achieves decentralization with a distributed storage consensus mechanism.Because of its decentralization,openness,anonymity,security and independence,blockchain has played an important role in many fields.However,due to the delay of the network,there may be differences in the copy of the blockchain maintained between nodes in the Bitcoin network.Thus,the Bitcoin blockchain is very easy to form forks and form useless blocks,which greatly leads to a waste of computing power in the network.In this article,we propose a new mining strategy.That is,when the blockchain generates forks,the owner of the block that caused the forks can use the smart contract to issue a reward(additional revenue)to attract other miners to help its fork winning the competition for becoming the longest chain.chain.At the same time,third-party miners can also choose a fork to achieve greater returns based on their expected revenues.We analyzed the feasibility of using smart contracts to post rewards,and gave the corresponding smart contract implementation.Subsequently,the corresponding model was constructed,and through game theory analysis,the expected revenues of different miners were calculated when they adopted different mining strategies,and their optimal strategy choices were analyzed.At the same time,we analysed the feasibility of the new mining strategy.Finally,we tested and analyzed the above models through simulation experiments.We compare the benefits of different miners in the simulation experiment with their theoretically calculated benefits to verify the correctness of the proposed model.Experimental results show that mining pools with lower computing power have greater incentives to post rewards,and when network delay is smaller,choosing a fork with lower computing power is more advantageous.At the same time,the greater difference in computing power between mining pools,the greater difference in their earnings due to network delays.This result indicates that the default strategy adopted by miners is not always the optimal choice.