Research on the Selection Strategies of Blockchain Mining Pools

Since the increasing popularization of the emerging blockchain technology, blockchain mining has attracted more and more attention. Due to the difficulty of solo mining, typically miners choose to join a mining pool. As there are many mining pools and different mining pools may adopt different reward mechanisms, how to choose the appropriate mining pool has become one of the most important issues faced by miners, since miners can get different rewards in different pools. In practice, there are three commonly used reward mechanisms for the mining pools to distribute the reward among their miners, namely, the proportional mechanism, the pay-per-share mechanism, and the pay-per-last-N-share mechanism. In this paper, we study the pool selection problem faced by the miners, and model it as a risk decision problem since different reward mechanisms have different risks. We establish a pool selection model based on the maximum-likelihood criterion and also study the effect of N on the miners' optimal pool selection decisions. By utilizing the computational experiments approach, we validate our proposed pool selection strategies. Our results can provide important managerial insights for miners when making their pool selection decisions.