Characterizing Ethereum’s Mining Power Decentralization at a Deeper Level

IEEE INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications Pub Date : 2021-05-10 DOI:10.1109/INFOCOM42981.2021.9488812

Liyi Zeng, Yang Chen, Shuo Chen, Xian Zhang, Zhongxin Guo, Wei Xu, T. Moscibroda

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引用次数: 7

Abstract

For proof-of-work blockchains such as Ethereum, the mining power decentralization is an important discussion point in the community. Previous studies mostly focus on the aggregated power of the mining pools, neglecting the pool participants who are the source of the pools’ power. In this paper, we present the first large-scale study of the pool participants in Ethereum’s mining pools. Pool participants are not directly observable because they communicate with their pools via private channels. However, they leave "footprints" on chain as they use Ethereum accounts to anonymously receive rewards from mining pools. For this study, we combine several data sources to identify 62,358,646 pool reward transactions sent by 47 pools to their participants over Ethereum’s entire near 5-year history. Our analyses about these transactions reveal interesting insights about three aspects of pool participants: the power decentralization at the participant level, their pool-switching behavior, and why they participate in pools. Our results provide a complementary and more balanced view about Ethereum’s mining power decentralization at a deeper level.

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从更深层次上描述以太坊的挖矿权力去中心化

对于像以太坊这样的工作量证明区块链来说，矿权去中心化是社区的一个重要讨论点。以往的研究大多关注矿池的总算力，忽略了作为矿池算力来源的矿池参与者。在本文中，我们首次对以太坊矿池中的池参与者进行了大规模研究。池参与者不能被直接观察到，因为他们通过私有通道与池通信。然而，当他们使用以太坊账户匿名从矿池获得奖励时，他们会在链上留下“足迹”。在这项研究中，我们结合了几个数据源，以确定在以太坊近5年的整个历史中，47个矿池向其参与者发送的62,358,646笔矿池奖励交易。我们对这些交易的分析揭示了关于池参与者的三个方面的有趣见解:参与者级别的权力分散，他们的池切换行为，以及他们为什么参与池。我们的研究结果在更深层次上为以太坊的挖矿权力去中心化提供了一个补充和更平衡的观点。

本文章由计算机程序翻译，如有差异，请以英文原文为准。

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IEEE INFOCOM 2021 - IEEE Conference on Computer Communications

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