Title: Stick or Twist: Balancing Blockchain Decentralisation and Miner Pooling

Authors: David Sheehan:University College Cork; Rob Gleasure:University College Cork;
Joe Feller:University College Cork; Shanping Li:Zheijiang University; Jerry Cristiforo:State Street

Abstract: The Emerging Blockchain technologies have earned substantial attention in the area of Financial Technology in recent years. Its decentralized environment allows for the mining of Bitcoins by miners either independently or in groups. The community of miners have faith in the integrity of each other to sustain the network, through mining pools remaining at a reasonable level of mining power. Blockchain’s decentralized system is one of its main selling points and is a source of great attraction for users. However, when these mining pools start to grow and increase their mining power to dangerous levels it can result in a shift towards a centralized environment. This push goes against foundational principles of Bitcoin, leading to ongoing debate among various stakeholders.

Download: This contribution is part of the OpenSym 2017 proceedings and is available as a PDF file.