Fee-Free Pooled Mining for Countering Pool-Hopping Attack in Blockchain

The pool-hopping attack casts down the expected profits of both the mining pool and honest miners in Blockchain. The mainstream countermeasures, namely PPS (pay-per-share) and PPLNS (pay-per-last-N-share), can hedge pool hopping but need to charge miners some fees when they join in a pool. Obviously, the higher fee charged, the higher cost of joining the pool, the less motivation of a miner to mine in the pool. In this article, we apply the zero-determinant (ZD) theory to design a novel pooled mining which offers an incentive mechanism for motivating miners not to switch in pools strategically by economic means without fee charged. In short, the proposed pooled mining has three unique features: 1) fee-free. No fee is charged if the miner does not hop, 2) wide applicability. It can be employed in both prepaid and postpaid mechanisms, and 3) fairness. Even can dominate the game with any miner, a pool has to cooperate when a miner does not hop among pools, implying that the pool cannot squeeze the honest miners financially. The fairness of our scheme makes it have long-term sustainability. Both theoretical analyses and numerical simulations demonstrate the effectiveness of our scheme.