Abstract
A blockchain is an immutable ledger driven by a distributed consensus protocol. In public blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum consensus is established through a computational effort called Proof-of-Work (PoW). Special users called miners contribute to the PoW computational effort in exchange for a fee and also verify the data stored in blocks mined by the other miners. Here is where the Verifier’s Dilemma emerges. To maximise their profits, miners are incentivized to invest their resources in PoW, because they do not receive any incentives for the verification phase. In this paper, we study the Verifier’s Dilemma using a quantitative model based on PEPA. The analysis demonstrates the circumstances under which non-verifying miners gain fees higher than that of verifying miners. Moreover, we consider a mitigation approach consisting of the injection of invalid blocks to disturb the mining process of non-verifying miners. The model allows us to derive the optimal rate at which invalid blocks must be injected, so that skipping the verifying phase becomes economically disadvantageous while the throughput of the blockchain is only minimally reduced. The impact on miners’ rewards and overall performance is also assessed.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Alharby, M., Lunardi, R.C., Aldweesh, A., van Moorsel, A.: Data-driven model-based analysis of the ethereum verifier’s Dilemma. In: 2020 50th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), pp. 209–220. IEEE (2020)
Alzetta, G., Marin, A., Piazza, C., Rossi, S.: Lumping-based equivalences in Markovian automata: algorithms and applications to product-form analyses. Inf. Comput. 260, 99–125 (2018)
Anjana, P.S., Kumari, S., Peri, S., Rathor, S., Somani, A.: An efficient framework for optimistic concurrent execution of smart contracts. In: 2019 27th Euromicro International Conference on Parallel, Distributed and Network-Based Processing (PDP), pp. 83–92. IEEE (2019)
Balsamo, S., Marin, A., Mitrani, I., Rebagliati, N.: Prediction of the consolidation delay in blockchain-based applications. In: ICPE 2021: ACM/SPEC International Conference on Performance Engineering, Virtual Event, France, 19–21 April 2021, pp. 81–92 (2021)
Buterin, V., et al.: Ethereum: A next-generation smart contract and decentralized application platform (2014)
Das, S., Awathare, N., Ren, L., Ribeiro, V.J., Bellur, U.: Tuxedo: maximizing smart contract computation in PoW blockchains. Proc. ACM Meas. Anal. Comput. Syst. 5(3), 1–30 (2021)
Das, S., Ribeiro, V.J., Anand, A.: YODA: Enabling computationally intensive contracts on blockchains with byzantine and selfish nodes. arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.03265 (2018)
Dickerson, T., Gazzillo, P., Herlihy, M., Koskinen, E.: Adding concurrency to smart contracts. Distrib. Comput. 33(3), 209–225 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00446-019-00357-z
Fiz Pontiveros, B.B., Ferreira Torres, C., State, R.: Sluggish mining: profiting from the verifier’s dilemma. In: Bracciali, A., Clark, J., Pintore, F., Rønne, P.B., Sala, M. (eds.) FC 2019. LNCS, vol. 11599, pp. 67–81. Springer, Cham (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-43725-1_6
Hillston, J.: A Compositional Approach to Performance Modelling. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (1996)
Kalodner, H., Goldfeder, S., Chen, X., Weinberg, S.M., Felten, E.W.: Arbitrum: scalable, private smart contracts. In: 27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 18), pp. 1353–1370 (2018)
Luu, L., Teutsch, J., Kulkarni, R., Saxena, P.: Demystifying incentives in the consensus computer. In: Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, pp. 706–719 (2015)
Marin, A., Rossi, S.: On the relations between lumpability and reversibility. In: MASCOTS, pp. 427–432. IEEE Computer Society (2014)
Marin, A., Rossi, S.: On the relations between Markov chain lumpability and reversibility. Acta Informatica 54(5), 447–485 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00236-016-0266-1
Olver, F.W.J., Lozier, D.W., Boisvert, R.F., Clark, C.W.: The NIST Handbook of Mathematical Functions. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge (2010)
Teutsch, J., Reitwießner, C.: A scalable verification solution for blockchains. arXiv preprint arXiv:1908.04756 (2019)
Yu, L., Tsai, W.T., Li, G., Yao, Y., Hu, C., Deng, E.: Smart-contract execution with concurrent block building. In: 2017 IEEE Symposium on Service-Oriented System Engineering (SOSE), pp. 160–167. IEEE (2017)
Acknowledgements
This work has been partially supported by the Project PRIN 2020 “Nirvana - Noninterference and Reversibility Analysis in Private Blockchains” - N. 20202FCJMH and by the Project GNCS 2022 “Proprietà qualitative e quantitative di sistemi reversibili”.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Appendices
Appendix
A Tables of Notations
The following tables provide a description of the notations used in the PEPA specification of the BM and IBIM models. In particular they describe the notations used to model the behaviours of single fair and unfair miners and those used for the environments.
B Steady State Probabilities for BM
We report the symbolic expressions of the steady-state probabilities for the BM model. In particular, the steady-state probabilities for the CTMC depicted in Fig. 2 are as follows:
where \(\sum _{i=1}^4\pi _i=1\) and K is the normalising constant whose expression is
C Steady-State Probabilities for IBIM
We report the symbolic expressions of the steady-state probabilities for the IBIM model. In particular, the steady-state probabilities for the CTMC depicted in Fig. 5 are as follows:
where \(\sum _{i=1}^8\pi _i=1\) and K is
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2022 Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this paper
Cite this paper
Smuseva, D., Malakhov, I., Marin, A., van Moorsel, A., Rossi, S. (2022). Verifier’s Dilemma in Ethereum Blockchain: A Quantitative Analysis. In: Ábrahám, E., Paolieri, M. (eds) Quantitative Evaluation of Systems. QEST 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13479. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16336-4_16
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-16336-4_16
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-16335-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-16336-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)