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Analyzing-Bitcoin-Unlimited

This is the evaluation code used in the CoNEXT 2017 paper "On the Necessity of a Prescribed Block Validity Consensus: Analyzing Bitcoin Unlimited Mining Protocol" by Ren Zhang and Bart Preneel. Bitcoin Unlimited was a Bitcoin scaling solution that received the largest mining power support until late June 2017. The code in this repository computes the optimal strategies and the maximum utility of a strategic miner in BU, under a predefined mining power distribution. Three utility functions are defined according to the strategic miner's three incentive models: compliant and profit-driven, non-compliant and profit-driven, non-profit-driven. Please check the paper for the complete definitions of the settings. Results computed by this code show that BU weakens Bitcoin's security when miners don't have a consensus on valid block size. Programmed by Ren Zhang.

The MDP state encoding and transition are quite complicated: many information regarding the structure of the blockchain needs to be encoded in the state to help the attacker make decisions. Therefore if you wish to fully understand and modify this source code rather than using it as a blackbox to execute and compare the results, the developer strongly recommend you to read the paper "the Optimal Selfish Mining Strategies" and understand my implementation of their algorithm before modifying this code.

2017.10.27 Update: the bug in the "non-compliant and profit-driven" part is fixed.

Quick Start

If you only need the results:

  1. Make sure you have matlab.
  2. Download the MDP toolbox for matlab, decompress it, put it in a directory such as '/users/yourname/Desktop/matlab/MDPtoolbox/fsroot/MDPtoolbox', copy the path.
  3. Download the code, open Matlab, change the working dir to the dir of the code.
  4. Open Init.m, paste your MDP toolbox path in the first line
addpath('/users/yourname/Desktop/matlab/MDPtoolbox/fsroot/MDPtoolbox');
  1. Modify AD, alpha, beta, gamma in Init.m. See their definitions in the paper.
  2. Run Init.m.

Implementation

  • Init.m The portal of the program. The parameters are defined here.
  • st2stnum.m A state in the paper is denoted as a 5-tuple. However in MDP, a state needs to be encoded as a number. This function converts a state tuple into the relevant number.
  • stnum2st.m This function does the reverse conversion.
  • SolveStrategy.m The code that actually computes the optimal mining strategies. The structure of the code follows the paper.
  • Checkstnum2st.m A test file, check whether st2stnum.m and stnum2st.m make a bijection.

Citation

Zhang R., Preneel B. (2017) On the Necessity of a Prescribed Block Validity Consensus: Analyzing Bitcoin Unlimited Mining Protocol. In: Proceedings of the 13th International on Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies. ACM, 2017.

@inproceedings{Zhang2017BU,
 author = {Ren Zhang and Bart Preneel},
 title = {On the Necessity of a Prescribed Block Validity Consensus: Analyzing {B}itcoin {U}nlimited Mining Protocol},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 13th International on Conference on Emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies},
 series = {CoNEXT '17},
 year = {2017},
 publisher = {ACM}
}

Chadès, I., Chapron, G., Cros, M. J., Garcia, F., & Sabbadin, R. (2014). MDPtoolbox: a multi‐platform toolbox to solve stochastic dynamic programming problems. Ecography, 37(9), 916-920.

@article{chades2014mdptoolbox,
  title={MDPtoolbox: a multi-platform toolbox to solve stochastic dynamic programming problems},
  author={Chad{\`e}s, Iadine and Chapron, Guillaume and Cros, Marie-Jos{\'e}e and Garcia, Fr{\'e}d{\'e}rick and Sabbadin, R{\'e}gis},
  journal={Ecography},
  volume={37},
  number={9},
  pages={916--920},
  year={2014},
  publisher={Wiley Online Library}
}

License

This code is licensed under GNU GPLv3.