This paper looks at different miner strategies with particular attention paid to subversive and dishonest strategies or those which could put Bitcoin and its reputation in danger. The authors study, in detail, several attacks in which dishonest miners obtained a higher reward than their relative contribution to the network.

It looks at miner strategies such as block withholding attacks and offers an alternative which maximises the advantages gained by rogue miners. There are several different methods by which Bitcoin network participants can increase their gains at the expense of other. This attacks could easy expand with new proposals and new methods. An example of this is the non-trivial cryptographic optimisation in the bitcoin mining process, which could be kept confidential by a group of miners.

Bitcoin cultivates this “impossible” cryptographers’ dream of building a payment system without any trusted parties. In theory bitcoin is a network which is expected to police itself. But not every miner has the best intentions. The most important thing to do is to question the assumptions of any miner strategies to see if they are likely to make any difference in practice. The authors of this paper conclude that it’s unlikely that these strategies will substantially increase in the future.