Block arrivals in the Bitcoin blockchain

Abstract

Bitcoin is a electronic payment system where payment transactions are verified and stored in a data structure called the blockchain. Bitcoin miners work individually to solve a computationally intensive problem, and with each solution a Bitcoin block is generated, resulting in a new arrival to the blockchain. The difficulty of the computational problem is updated every 2,016 blocks in order to control the rate at which blocks are generated. In the original Bitcoin paper, it was suggested that the blockchain arrivals occur according to a homogeneous Poisson process. Based on blockchain block arrival data and stochastic analysis of the block arrival process, we demonstrate that this is not the case. We present a refined mathematical model for block arrivals, focusing on both the block arrivals during a period of constant difficulty and how the difficulty level evolves over time.

References in corpus (3)

• Analysis of Bitcoin Pooled Mining Reward Systems
• Analysis of Hashrate-Based Double Spending
• ZeroBlock: Timestamp-Free Prevention of Block-Withholding Attack in Bitcoin

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• Predicting the confirmation time of Bitcoin transactions
• Analysis of Difficulty Control in Bitcoin and Proof-of-Work Blockchains
• Profitable Double-Spending Attacks
• On the profitability of selfish blockchain mining under consideration of ruin
• DAG-Oriented Protocols PHANTOM and GHOSTDAG under Incentive Attack via Transaction Selection Strategy
• Hydra: A Multiple Blockchain Protocol for Improving Transaction Throughput
• An Interleaving Hybrid Consensus Protocol
• A Mean Field Game Analysis of Consensus Protocol Design