Inertial Mining: Equilibrium Implementation of the Bitcoin Protocol

Computer Science > Cryptography and Security [Submitted on 7 Apr 2026] Inertial Mining: Equilibrium Implementation of the Bitcoin Protocol Manuel Mueller-Frank, Minghao Pan, Omer Tamuz The value of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies critically depends on miners having incentives to follow the protocol. However, the Bitcoin mining protocol proposed by Nakamoto (2008) and implemented in practice is well known not to constitute an equilibrium: Eyal and Sirer (2018) construct a profitable deviation called ``selfish mining'' which relies on strategically delaying disclosure of newly mined blocks rather than publishing them immediately. We propose inertial mining, a novel mining protocol. When miners follow inertial mining, they produce the outcome intended by Nakamoto, i.e., a single longest chain. But unlike the Bitcoin mining protocol, inertial mining constitutes an equilibrium (assuming no miner controls more than half of the mining power). Indeed, neither selfish mining nor any other deviation is profitable. Furthermore, inertial mining only changes miners' behavior in the event of off-path forks, and can be implemented in Bitcoin without any changes to its consensus mechanism or blockchain architecture. Subjects: Cryptography and Security (cs.CR); Computer Science and Game Theory (cs.GT); Theoretical Economics (econ.TH) Cite as: arXiv:2604.06092 [cs.CR]   (or arXiv:2604.06092v1 [cs.CR] for this version)   https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2604.06092 Focus to learn more Submission history From: Omer Tamuz [view email] [v1] Tue, 7 Apr 2026 17:06:02 UTC (23 KB) Access Paper: HTML (experimental) view license Current browse context: cs.CR < prev   |   next > new | recent | 2026-04 Change to browse by: cs cs.GT econ econ.TH References & Citations NASA ADS Google Scholar Semantic Scholar Export BibTeX Citation Bookmark Bibliographic Tools Bibliographic and Citation Tools Bibliographic Explorer Toggle Bibliographic Explorer (What is the Explorer?) Connected Papers Toggle Connected Papers (What is Connected Papers?) Litmaps Toggle Litmaps (What is Litmaps?) scite.ai Toggle scite Smart Citations (What are Smart Citations?) Code, Data, Media Demos Related Papers About arXivLabs Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)