Decentralization Cheapens Corruptive Majority Attacks

Abstract

Corruptive majority attacks, in which mining power is distributed among miners and an attacker attempts to bribe a majority of miners into participation in a majority attack, pose a threat to blockchains. Budish bounded the cost of bribing miners to participate in an attack by their expected loss as a result of attack success. We show that this bound is loose. In particular, an attack may be structured so that under equilibrium play by most miners, a miner’s choice to participate only slightly affects the attack success chance. Combined with the fact that most of the cost of attack success is externalized by any given small miner, this implies that if most mining power is controlled by small miners, bribing miners to participate in such an attack is much cheaper than the Budish bound. We provide a scheme for a cheap corruptive majority attack and discuss practical concerns and consequences.