The value of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies critically depends on miners having incentives to follow the protocol. However, the Bitcoin mining protocol proposed by Nakamoto (2008) and implemented in practice is well known not to constitute an equilibrium: Eyal and Sirer (2018) construct a profitable deviation called ``selfish mining'' which relies on strategically delaying disclosure of newly mined blocks rather than publishing them immediately. We propose inertial mining, a novel mining protocol. When miners follow inertial mining, they produce the outcome intended by Nakamoto, i.e., a single longest chain. But unlike the Bitcoin mining protocol, inertial mining constitutes an equilibrium (assuming no miner controls more than half of the mining power). Indeed, neither selfish mining nor any other deviation is profitable. Furthermore, inertial mining only changes miners' behavior in the event of off-path forks, and can be implemented in Bitcoin without any changes to its consensus mechanism or blockchain architecture.

翻译：工作量证明加密货币的价值关键取决于矿工有遵循协议的激励。然而，中本聪（2008）提出并在实践中实施的比特币挖矿协议，众所周知并不构成均衡：Eyal和Sirer（2018）构造了一种名为"自私挖矿"的有利可图的偏离策略，该策略依赖于战略性延迟披露新挖出的区块，而非立即发布它们。我们提出了一种全新的挖矿协议——惯性挖矿。当矿工遵循惯性挖矿时，他们会产生中本聪所预期的结果，即单一最长链。但与比特币挖矿协议不同，惯性挖矿构成了一个均衡（假设没有矿工控制超过一半的算力）。事实上，无论是自私挖矿还是任何其他偏离策略都无法获利。此外，惯性挖矿仅在发生偏离路径的分叉时改变矿工行为，并且无需对其共识机制或区块链架构进行任何修改即可在比特币中实施。