Selfish Mining is strategic rule-breaking to maximize rewards in proof-of-work protocols [3] and Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the preferred tool for finding optimal strategies in Bitcoin [4, 10] and similar linear chain protocols [12]. Protocols increasingly adopt non-sequential chain structures [11], for which MDP analysis is more involved [2]. To date, researchers have tailored specific attack spaces for each protocol [2, 4, 5, 7, 10, 12]. Assumptions differ, and validating and comparing results is difficult. To overcome this, we propose a generic attack space that supports the wide class of DAG protocols that provide a total ordering of blocks [11], e. g., Ethereum, Fruitchains, and Parallel Proof-of-Work. Our approach is modular: we specify each protocol as one program, and then derive the Selfish Mining MDPs automatically.

翻译：私密挖矿（Selfish Mining）是在工作量证明协议中为最大化奖励而进行的策略性违规行为[3]，而马尔可夫决策过程（MDPs）是寻找比特币[4,10]及类似线性链协议[12]最优策略的首选工具。协议日益采用非顺序链结构[11]，这使得MDP分析更加复杂[2]。迄今为止，研究人员为每种协议定制了特定的攻击空间[2,4,5,7,10,12]。假设条件各不相同，验证和比较结果十分困难。为解决这一问题，我们提出了一种通用攻击空间，支持提供块全序关系的大类DAG协议[11]，例如以太坊（Ethereum）、水果链（Fruitchains）和平行工作量证明（Parallel Proof-of-Work）。我们的方法是模块化的：我们将每种协议定义为一个程序，然后自动推导出私密挖矿MDP。