Bitcoin miners: Exploring a covert community in the Bitcoin ecosystem
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Bitcoin miners: Exploring a covert community in the Bitcoin ecosystem Jieyu Xu1,2 · Wen Bai1,2 · Miao Hu1,2 · Haibo Tian1,2,3 · Di Wu1,2 Received: 10 February 2020 / Accepted: 22 October 2020 © Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract In the Bitcoin ecosystem, bitcoin miners play an indispensable role in maintaining the Bitcoin’s blockchain. As a consequence, they are also rewarded with newly-created bitcoins and transaction fees. However, there are very limited studies to fully understand the characteristics and behaviors of bitcoin miners. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive measurement study to shed insights into the community of bitcoin miners. By analyzing over ten-year bitcoin transaction logs, we observe that the scale of bitcoin miners shrinks significantly in recent years, and a small fraction of miners received most of newly generated bitcoins. In the early stage of the Bitcoin ecosystem, the mining reward was evenly distributed among miners, but later became more concentrated to a few highly active miners. For most of miners, their active duration is less than one year, and the interval between consecutive mining actions is more than 100 days. By further examining the transaction flows, we find that a significant portion of bitcoins have been hoarded for over 5 years, and the hoarding phenomenon becomes intense in recent years. We also discuss the implications of our findings, and believe our measurements enable us to have a better understanding of the whole Bitcoin ecosystem. Keywords Bitcoin · Mining · Measurement · Transactions
1 Introduction The past decade has witnessed the dramatic growth of cryptocurrencies (e.g., Bitcoin,1 Ripple,2 Ethereum,3 and Tether4 ), among which Bitcoin attracts the most attention. As a decentralized and anonymous digital currency, Bitcoin does not rely on any centralized entity to maintain account information. Instead, Bitcoin uses a distributed ledger to identify and record all transactions among users. To ensure privacy and security, some encryption and decryption algorithms are also adopted. The price of Bitcoin has risen from $0 in the year 2009 to a peak of nearly $20, 000 per coin in December 2017. The profitability of 1 http://www.bitcoin.org 2 https://www.ripple.com 3 https://www.ethereum.org 4 https://tether.to
Di Wu
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Extended author information available on the last page of the article.
cryptocurrencies has given birth to a new business, namely, cryptocurrency mining. The Bitcoin ecosystem is built on top of the blockchain that contains a chain of chronologically ordered blocks, each of which includes a series of transactions and head information. Each user can voluntarily verify and pack new transactions into blocks at any time, but only the latest valid blocks will be confirmed by all users and attached to the current blockchain. The user who creates a block, named miner, will receive all transaction fees in the block and the reward of the new block for its verification based on the proof-
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