Can PoW Consensus Protocol Resist the Whale Attack?

Abstract

Proof of Work (PoW) is the most widely used consensus protocol. However, due to the hash rate competition mechanism, longest chain principle, and transaction fee mechanism of the PoW consensus protocol, malicious nodes can launch attacks to obtain more relative revenue than honest mining, which will discourage honest miners from packing transactions into blocks and verifying blocks. As a result, the speed of the nodes reaching consensus in the network is slowed down, or even consensus cannot be reached, which ultimately affects the security of the PoW consensus protocol.In this paper, the Markov Decision Process (MDP) is used to simulate the whale attack launched by malicious nodes, and evaluate the capability of PoW consensus protocol against the whale attack. The experimental results show that the PoW consensus protocol is secure in the Bitcoin network when the transaction fee is set in the range of 0.002-0.3 block rewards and the transaction volume should not exceed 21.09 block rewards. In addition, the PoW consensus protocol will be more secure with the adjustment of parameters such as the number of block confirmations, block generation interval and block size.