Profitable Double-Spending Attacks

Our aim in this paper is to investigate the profitability of double-spending (DS) attacks that manipulate a priori mined transaction in a blockchain. Up to date, it was understood that the requirement for successful DS attacks is to occupy a higher proportion of computing power than a target network's proportion; i.e., to occupy more than 51% proportion of computing power. On the contrary, we show that DS attacks using less than 50% proportion of computing power can also be vulnerable. Namely, DS attacks using any proportion of computing power can occur as long as the chance to making a good profit is there; i.e., revenue of an attack is greater than the cost of launching it. We have novel probability theory based derivations for calculating time finite attack probability. This can be used to size up the resource needed to calculate the revenue and the cost. The results enable us to derive sufficient and necessary conditions on the value of a target transaction which make DS attacks for any proportion of computing power profitable. They can also be used to assess the risk of one's transaction by checking whether or not the transaction value satisfies the conditions for profitable DS attacks. Two examples are provided in which we evaluate the attack resources and the conditions for profitable DS attacks given 35% proportion of computing power against Syscoin and BitcoinCash networks, and quantitatively shown how vulnerable they are.