New Reputation-Based Mining Paradigm: Incentivizing Blockchain Miners to Avoid Dishonest Mining Strategies

Verification of transactions in digital currencies is very resource intensive, therefore, miners form mining pools to verify each block of transactions in return for a reward where only the first mining pool that accomplishes the process will be rewarded.This leads to intense competitions among miners, and consequently, dishonest mining strategies, e.g., block withholding attack, selfish mining, to name a few. As such, it is necessary to regulate the mining process to make the miners accountable for dishonest behaviors. We therefore designed a new reputation-based mining paradigm in which theminers not only were incentivized to conduct honest mining but also disincentivized to commit any malicious activities against other mining pools.