Full Selfish Mining Attack on Blockchain

As the number of blockchain miners increases, mining profits tend to stabilize, leading to more rational behavior among miners. Mining attacks, particularly the influential selfish mining (SM) attack, seek to unfairly boost adversary profits by strategically withholding and releasing discovered blocks, thereby wasting the computational resources of other miners. Existing SM methods primarily focus on adversary strategies, assuming that honest miners continue mining regardless of the circumstances. However, our research reveals that honest miners can optimize their profits by adopting intermittent mining strategies—mining during non-fork states and halting during equal-length fork states. This finding forms the basis of our proposed theory of rational miners' intermittent mining.

Building on this insight, we propose Full Selfish Mining (FSM), a novel attack strategy in which the adversary maximizes profits by maintaining the blockchain in equal-length fork states. Experimental results demonstrate that FSM consistently yields higher expected profits than SM, enabling 51\% attacks with just 29\% of the computing power.