happy last day of feb🗓️! thrilled to share a new paper – "Selfish mining under general stochastic rewards." i was very lucky to collab with @bahrani_maryam and Matt Weinberg and learned a ton about fundamental research! check out the preprint here ⇣📝

(1/4) we started with the basic question of evaluating selfish mining under a combination of block rewards and transaction fees from these two classic papers: this wasn't too complex so we didn't stop there.

(2/4) we next incorporated a third reward source – large, one-off rewards (modeled as Bernoulli trials and approximating some types of MEV) into the miner reward functions, which is similar to a model of "whale transactions" from:

(3/4) pausing here, we wanted to truly understand what *types* of rewards this style of analysis could capture, leading us to create a much more general model for rewards and their properties; this ended up being the most notable contribution of the paper IMO! (section 3)

(4/4) we hope the paper is interesting as is (albeit long), but we also plan on following up with a couple less formal (more diagram-y) blog posts highlighting the core modeling, methodological, and numerical results. stay tuned for that 📻