Mining attacks allow adversaries to obtain a disproportionate share of the mining reward by deviating from the honest mining strategy in the Bitcoin system. Among them, the most well-known are selfish mining (SM), block withholding (BWH), fork after withholding (FAW) and bribery mining. In this paper, we propose two novel mining attacks: bribery semiselfish mining (BSSM) and bribery stubborn mining (BSM). Unlike prior work (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding), these attacks integrate bribery mechanisms to strategically influence miner behavior, leading to a 6% higher relative extra reward for adversaries in BSSM compared to semi-selfish mining and a 2% increase in BSM compared to selfish mining. This creates a novel “bribery miner's dilemma” where target miners face a Nash equilibrium conflict: individually optimal to accept bribes, but globally optimal to reject them, directly impacting the decentralization and reward distribution of the mining ecosystem. Furthermore, quantitative analysis and simulation have verified our theoretical analysis. We propose practical measures to mitigate more advanced mining attack strategies based on bribery mining and provide new ideas for addressing bribery mining attacks in the future. However, how to completely and effectively prevent these attacks is still needed on further research.

Proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain relies on incentive mechanisms to ensure the security and correctness of its underlying consensus protocol. Most research about it, based on a static model only considering coin-base rewards and transaction fee rewards, fails to accurately describe the complex real-world blockchain ecosystem. We propose a generic selfish mining attack applicable to arbitrary PoW blockchain systems and introduce a dynamic PoW blockchain incentive model. This model takes into account static basic rewards, dynamic whale rewards related to network protocol, and expenditures tied to players’ strategies. Unlike traditional incentive models that assume players continuously mine by default, we find players prefer to halt mining at the beginning of each mining cycle to reduce operational expenses and then resume mining at an appropriate time to enhance their rewards. We further prove players’ optimal strategy exists and it is determined by reward parameters. We implement a modified PoW blockchain system simulator and comprehensively validate these results using 256 full nodes in it of three mainstream PoW blockchains: Bitcoin, Ethereum 1.x, and Bitcoin Cash. We finally discuss the impact of different parameters on the security of PoW blockchain systems and propose practical mitigating measures for the mining halt.