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2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter

Echoes of the Past: Recovering Blockchain Metrics from Merged Mining

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

Published in: Financial Cryptography and Data Security

Publisher: Springer International Publishing

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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previous chapter Sprites and State Channels: Payment Networks that Go Faster Than Lightning

next chapter TxProbe: Discovering Bitcoin’s Network Topology Using Orphan Transactions

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

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

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

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.

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

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Title: Echoes of the Past: Recovering Blockchain Metrics from Merged Mining
Authors: Nicholas Stifter
Philipp Schindler
Aljosha Judmayer
Alexei Zamyatin
Andreas Kern
Edgar Weippl
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Book: Financial Cryptography and Data Security
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-32100-0

Electronic ISBN: 978-3-030-32101-7

Copyright Year: 2019
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32101-7_31

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