2019 38th International Symposium on Reliable Distributed Systems Workshops (SRDSW)
Pooled Mining is Driving Blockchains Toward
Centralized Systems
Liuyang Ren
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Canada
l27ren@uwaterloo.ca
Abstract—The decentralization property of blockchains stems
from the fact that each miner accepts or refuses transactions and
blocks based on its own verification results. However, pooled min-
ing causes blockchains to evolve into centralized systems because
pool participants delegate their decision-making rights to pool
managers. In this paper, we established and validated a model
for Proof-of-Work mining, introduced the concept of equivalent
blocks, and quantitatively derived that pooling effectively lowers
the income variance of miners. We also analyzed Bitcoin and
Ethereum data to prove that pooled mining has become prevalent
in the real world. The percentage of pool-mined blocks increased
from 49.91% to 91.12% within four months in Bitcoin and from
76.9% to 92.2% within five months in Ethereum. In July 2018,
Bitcoin and Ethereum mining were dominated by only six and
five pools respectively.
Keywords-public blockchain; centralization; pooled mining;
modeling; data analysis
I. I NTRODUCTION
Bitcoin, introduced by Satoshi Nakamoto in [1] as a cash
system without a central authority, is now experiencing cen-
tralization due to pooled mining. In a blockchain network,
a full node maintains a copy of the public ledger recording
what transactions have happened and in what order. The
process of appending blocks to the ledger is called mining.
Bitcoin relies on Proof-of-Work (PoW) to select a leader
to propose the next block. In order to motivate miners to
participate in the consensus process and extend the ledger,
Bitcoin rewards miners with newly minted coins. Specifically,
there are seven steps in block appending: (1) listening for
transactions, validate them; (2) listening for blocks, validate
them; (3) maintaining a replica of blockchain and choosing
the parent block based on the consensus rule; (4) assembling
a block; (5) solving a PoW puzzle; (6) publishing the block to
the network; (7) waiting for the block to be buried deep enough
in the blockchain so that the reward becomes spendable [2].
In the first three steps, miners secure the network via
validating transactions and blocks; in the following three,
miners append new transactions to the ledger; in the last step,
miners are rewarded for their dedication to the work. How-
ever, pooled mining destroys this incentivizing mechanism.
Pool participants only do Step (5) for rewards and delegate
their voting rights to the pool manager. This situation drives
blockchain systems toward centralization, which violates the
978-1-7281-4255-5/19/$31.00 ©2019 IEEE
DOI 10.1109/SRDSW49218.2019.00015
Paul A.S. Ward
Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering
University of Waterloo
Waterloo, Canada
pasward@ccng.uwaterloo.ca
essential decentralization property of blockchains. There is no
effective pool-resistant mechanism for Bitcoin and Ethereum
at present, as pools still dominate mining [3] [4].
This paper makes two main contributions:
• We build the first quantitative model which reveals that
the income variance of a miner is inversely proportional
to pool sizes and that the expected income is hardly
affected by pooling.
• We analyze real-world data from both Bitcoin and
Ethereum. The results show that pools dominate mining
for both blockchains starting from late 2017, coinciding
with the surge in their prices.
II. BACKGROUND
In PoW-based blockchains, a valid block header hash must
be smaller than or equal to a target threshold, usually with tens
of leading zeros. Since hash functions are one-way, miners
have to adjust some fields (e.g. nonce in block header) and
then hash the header to check if it meets the requirement.
A pool manager joins a blockchain network as a single
miner. Instead of solving PoW puzzles by itself, the pool
manager outsources the task to pool participants after vali-
dating transactions and assembling a block. A pool manager
assembles a block with its own address as the receiver in the
coinbase transaction. Then the block header is sent to every
participant in the pool, as shown in Figure 1, and everyone
tries different nonces and timestamps for this block header1 .
Participants are not able to mine blocks for themselves
because they do not know the coinbase transaction in the
block body. If a participant finds a valid nonce, it sends the
nonce back to the pool manager, who later distributes the
reward based on how much work each participant has done.
Participants prove their contribution by sending shares, i.e.,
near-valid blocks, to the pool manager. For example, if the
target threshold starts with 75 leading zeros, a share may have
only 70 leading zeros. Depending on the pooling protocol [5],
pool participants may receive reward either when they submit
shares or when the pool finds a block. A block reward consists
of a block subsidy, i.e. newly minted coins, and transaction
1 For Bitcoin, the timestamp is a UNIX timestamp that must be greater than
the median of the previous 11 blocktimestamps and less than two hours in
the future.
43
 Merkle root
nonce
Manager
timestamp
(other header fields)
coinbase tx {...}
(other transactions)
Participant Participant
Merkle root Merkle root
nonce nonce
timestamp timestamp
(other header fields) (other header fields)
Fig. 1. Pool manager sends only block header to participants.
fees. A pool manager could take some management fees for
each block, usually around 2% of the block subsidy, and
distributes the remaining block subsidy to participants. Some
pools have their managers keep all transaction fees, whereas
others distribute transaction fees to participants [6].
III. M ODEL OF P OW MINING
We make the following assumptions when modeling PoW
mining:
1) Hash functions are collision resistant [7], so we can
safely assume that hash values produced by different
miners do not collide.
2) Hash values are uniformly distributed over the output
range of the hash function [8]. One corollary of this as-
sumption is that every hash output is of equal probability
to meet the difficulty requirement (i.e., have enough bits
of leading zeros).
3) Hash functions satisfy the diffusion property, i.e., statis-
tically half the bits in the ciphertext should change if a
single bit in the plaintext changes [9].
4) No forking occurs.
5) There is no block propagation delay. Once a block comes
out, all miners learn about it immediately and start to
work on the next block.
The last three assumptions together guarantee that block
discoveries are independent events. When a new block Blocki
come out, all miners must refer to it as the parent in their next
block templates (Assumption 4), and thus previous work on
finding Blocki has no effects on discovering a Blocki+1 (As-
sumption 3) regardless of whoever found Blocki (Assumption
5).
Poisson process models are built in Section III-A based on
these assumptions. Assumptions 4 and 5 are unlikely to always
hold in practice, so a goodness-of-fit test is performed to prove
the model is eligible for blockchain analysis in section III-B.
44
A. Poisson Process Model
We define mining difficulty (denoted by D) as the average
number of hashes being tried in order to find one hash
with sufficient bits of leading zeros. Simply speaking, one
out of D hashes is valid, on average. Blockchains usually
have automatically adjusted D to ensure a certain mean time
between blocks, e.g., 10 minutes for Bitcoin [1] [10] and 10-20
seconds for Ethereum [11].
Independent block discoveries and predefined average mean
time between blocks justify a Poisson process model [12] [10]
[5] [2]. In our model, the hash power of the entire network is
denoted as hetr , and time is divided into disjointed intervals
of length t. Consequently, the entire network can try
hetr t
different hashes in a time interval. We use Xetr
to denote the
number of blocks found in an interval by the entire network.
The probability mass function (PMF) of Xetr can be expressed
as
λk · e−λ ( hetr t )k · e−hetr t
P (Xetr = k) = = D D
k! k! (1)
where e is the base of the natural logarithm; k
number (including zero). According to Equation is1, ait natural
is only
the ratio of hetr to D that is significant. Absolute values of the
two variables are not important. The value of hetr
on the units of hetr and t. For instance, in Bitcoin, /D depends
1/10 if hashes per minute and minute are used, andhetr /D =
1/600 if hashes per second and second are used. hetr /D =
Now we zoom in and only consider the mining process
of a single miner m. Block discoveries are still independent
events based on Assumptions 3-5. We denote the hash rate
of m by h. m is able to try ht hashes in an interval, so the
expected number of blocks is ht/D according to Assumption
2. Therefore, the Poisson process with the rate parameter
ht/D is an appropriate model for a single miner. We use λ =
denote the number of blocks found by m in an interval.XTheto
probability mass function(PMF) of X can be expressed as
ht
λk · e−λ ( ht )k · e− D
P (X = k) = = D
k! k! (2)
Similarly, the number of blocks (denoted by
in an interval by a pool who computes hash valuesXpoolat
) found
a rate
of H conforms to the Poisson distribution with
λ = Ht/D.
B. Model Evaluation with Bitcoin Data
To evaluate the model built in Section III-A, we ran a
Bitcoin Core instance to obtain data recorded on the Bitcoin
blockchain [13]. Because Bitcoin adjusts D every 2016 blocks,
we selected 2016 blocks (block height 516096 to 518111) of
the same D (nBits = 0x17502ab7) for the model evaluation.
We use hashes per minute and minute as units of
t, so hetr /D = 1/10. Since the absolute values ofhetr and
D do not matter, we set hetr = 1 and D = 10 hetr and
power of an individual miner or pool relative to . The hash
hetr tocan
estimated by the ratio of blocks mined by this miner be
2016,
because
h ht/D E(X)
= =
hetr hetr t/D E(Xetr ) (3)
 90 180
Theoretical value ( =10 ) Theoretical value ( =9 15 )
80
D hetr
160
D . hetr

Theoretical value ( =9 15 )
D . hetr Data from Bitcoin blockchain
70 Data from Bitcoin blockchain 140
60 120
Frequency

Frequency
50 100
40 80
30 60
20 40
10 20
0−2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 0−2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
Number of blocks found in one hour Number of blocks found in one hour
(a) Entire network (b) BTC.com

450
Theoretical value ( =9 15 )
D . hetr Theoretical value ( =9 15 )
400
D . hetr

200 Data from Bitcoin blockchain Data from Bitcoin blockchain

350
300
150
Frequency

Frequency
250
100 200
150
50 100
50
0−2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16 0−2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 16
Number of blocks found in one hour Number of blocks found in one hour
(c) ViaBTC (d) BTCCPool
Fig. 2. Frequency histogram of number of blocks mined in one hour (from Bitcoin block height 516096 to 518111)

TABLE I
where E(X) denotes the expected value of variable X. M INERS AND T HEIR R ELATIVE H ASH P OWER
We analyzed the distribution of the number of blocks mined
Pool Name Blocks Found Relative Hash Power
in one hour (t = 60 minutes) for the entire network and
Entire Network 2016 1
three pools with different hash rates as listed in Table I. The
BTC.com 530 0.26
blue curve in Figure 2a comprises theoretical values produced
ViaBTC 221 0.11
by Equation 1. There is an obvious offset between the blue
BTCCPool 63 0.03
curve and actual Bitcoin data because D is adjusted based
on previous 2016 blocks but used for block validation for the
next 2016 blocks. Since miners are incentivized to upgrade
their mining hardware over time, the actual value of D/hetr not follow a Poisson distribution. However, it is not hard
should be less than 10. We then calculated the actual mean to observe that our model produces a relatively large error
time between blocks of the 2016 blocks under consideration for BTC.com in Figure 2b. The difference could result from
using the timestamp field in block headers. Unsurprisingly, the the violation of Assumption 5 in the real world. In order to
value is 9.15 minutes. With D set to 9.15, the red curve in forward a block a single hop, the sending miner has to verify
Figure 2a matches practical data better than the blue one. the block, announce its knowledge of the block to the receiving
The model also matches the data of the three pools as miner, wait for the response of the receiving miner, and finally
illustrated in Figure 2b, 2c, and 2d. We performed a Chi- send the block if the receiving miner has not heard of the
squared goodness-of-fit test to determine whether a Poisson block. [10]. Decker et al. found that the mean time until a node
process is an appropriate model for the observed Bitcoin data. receives a block is 12.6 seconds in Bitcoin network [10]. When
Table II gives the test results. Since all p-values are greater block propagation delay is considered, a miner is always the
than 0.05, there is no evidence to suggest that the data do first to receive blocks mined by itself and thus had more time

45
than others to work on the next blocks. This situation makes  k k
V ar(Xeq ) = P (Xeq = ) · [ − E(Xeq )]2
block discoveries not completely independent, especially for S S
k
large pools.  k E(Xpool ) 2
= P (Xpool = k) · [ − ]
TABLE II S S
G OODNESS - OF - FIT T EST R ESULTS k
1  (7)
= 2 P (Xpool = k) · [k − E(Xpool )]2
Pool Name p-value S
k
Entire Network 0.44 1
BTC.com 0.09 =
· V ar(Xpool )
S2
VIA 0.33
h2 Ht h ht 1 ht
BTCC 0.80 = 2· =( )· = ·
H D H D S D
Equations (6) and (7) show that joining a pool keeps a
IV. I NCENTIVES TO J OIN A P OOL miner’s expected income unchanged but lowers the income
variance by a factor of S, as summarized in Table III.
This section quantitatively analyzes the main benefit of
joining a pool and briefly introduce other minor factors. In TABLE III
our analysis, we use small miners to refer to miners owning C OMPARISON OF M INING S TRATEGIES
relatively small amounts of computational resources, and sim-
Mining Strategy Expected Blocks Variance
ilarly, large miners to refer to miners owning relatively huge ht ht
Solo
amounts of computational resources. From the perspective of D
ht
D
ht
Pooled /S
the network, pools and large solo miners are indistinguishable, D D

so large miners include both of them.

A. Low Income Variance
Since the management fee only accounts for a small portion 1.0
of the reward, we ignore it in the following model of pooled Solo
Join a 20x pool
Join a 50x pool
mining. We define equivalent blocks as a measurement of a
0.8

+ Join a 100x pool

pool participant’s income: when the pool mines Xpool blocks, * Join a 200x pool

we deem a participant m mines Xeq = Xpool /S equivalent

Probability

0.6

blocks where S is the relative pool size equal to the ratio of

the pool’s hash rate to m’s hash rate (i.e., S = H/h). The
0.4

corollary of this definition is that P (Xeq = Sk ) = P (Xpool =

k). The expected value and variance of Xeq are derived as
0.2

++
follows: ++
+*******++
+
+**+***** ******+**+**+**+**+**+**+**+**+**+**+
0.0

**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+
**+ **+
**+ **+**+

E(Xpool ) = P (Xpool = k) · k 0.0 0.2 0.4 0.6 0.8 1.0
k (4)
Ht Number of equivalent blocks
= (by Poisson dist.)
D
Fig. 3. PMF of the number of equivalent blocks mined by an example miner

V ar(Xpool ) = P (Xpool = k) · [k − E(Xpool )]2 Example. The following example visually demonstrates the
k (5) effect of joining a pool from a miner’s perspective. Suppose
Ht
= (by Poisson dist.) a miner m uses an Application-Specific Integrated Circuit
D (ASIC) mining hardware whose capacity is h = 14 × 240
k
Since P (Xeq = S) = P (Xpool = k), we have hashes/s to mine Bitcoin continuously for a year. On March
9, 2018, the nBits value is 0x175589a3 in hexadecimal,
 k k which can be converted to a target threshold of 0x5589a3 ×
E(Xeq ) = P (Xeq = )· 2560x17−3 = 0x5589a3 × 2160 [14]. Since the threshold
S S
k
 starts with 73 leading zeros, we use 273 to approximate the
k
= P (Xpool = k) · mining difficulty D in this example. When m joins pools of
S (6) different sizes, the PMF of Xeq varies as shown in Figure
k
1 3. It is obvious that m is faced with high variance under
= · E(Xpool )
S solo mining. The probability of mining at least one block
h Ht ht in a year is only 0.05, whereas that of not even receiving
= · =
H D D

46
any reward in a year is as high as 0.95. Figure 3 clearly


!"
illustrates that: (1) the expected number of equivalent blocks
 !"
stays constant, regardless of pool sizes, and (2) the variance





drops significantly if m joins a pool. The larger the pool size,

the lower the variance.

Low income variance implies steady income and hence

predictable short-term income, which are strong incentives

because people usually value certainty especially when it

comes to money.


 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 
 
 
 














V. R EAL - WORLD B LOCKCHAIN DATA A NALYSIS


In Section IV, a Poisson process model is employed to
explain why miners are incentivized to pool in theory. In Fig. 4. Number of pool-mined and non-pool-mined Bitcoin blocks from
January 2017 to July 2018
this section, real-world data from Bitcoin and Ethereum are
examined to reveal that pooling has indeed become a trend
and blockchains may not be as decentralized as claimed. BTC.com
Miners are identified based on tags labeled by block ex- BitClub
plorers of Bitcoin [3] and Ethereum [15] [16]. This approach Bixin
was also taken by Gencer et al. [17]. The analytical results 21.2% AntPool
2.0%
would be representative even if miner tags were wrong because BTC.TOP 2.0% KanoPool
12.5% Huobi.pool
blocks are grouped by miner addresses instead of tags. In other BitcoinRussia
9.3% SecretSuperstar
words, each slice in Figure 5 and 7 (excluding the slice labeled ConnectBTC
2.7% 2.0% tigerpool.net
as other miners and the slice aggregating multiple small pools) DPOOL tiger
CanoePool
corresponds to one distinct block reward receiver address, but 8.9% 11.7% BitMinter
Bitcoin.com
the name of the receiver might be inaccurate. F2Pool 0.9% 2.1% Other miners
11.1%
While identifying pools, we found that although miners 1.4% 12.1%
were allowed to create an unlimited number of addresses, most 58COIN
BWPool
pools continued using the same one, and others consumed less
SlushPool
than five addresses over the years. We suspect that pools want BTCC ViaBTC
to be identified so that they can leverage their mining records
on blockchains to build up a reputation. Further analysis is
Fig. 5. Bitcoin block distribution among miners in July 2018. Pool names
needed to support this hypothesis. were collected from [3].

A. Bitcoin
We ran a Bitcoin full node implemented in C++ [13]. Data
on the blockchain were retrieved via the Remote Procedure
Call (RPC) Application Programming Interface (API) and
stored in a MySQL database for analysis. We extracted data
between January 1, 2017 and July 31, 2018. This time range
was intentionally chosen because it witnessed the growth of
pool-mined blocks—from 49.9% in November 2017 to 91.1%
in February 2018. The huge increase in pool-mined blocks co-
occurred with the surge in Bitcoin price [18]. We suspect that
the reason was people became serious about gaining short-term
income when Bitcoin price grew. Detailed analysis is needed
to prove this hypothesis. Afterwards, over 88% of blocks were
mined by pools every month as shown in Figure 42 .
The July 2018 data were further investigated to study block
distribution among pools. Figure 5 shows that 75.1% of blocks
were mined by only six pools, four of which collectively
possessed enough computational resources to subvert Bitcoin.
2 The non-pool portion in Figure 4 may contain blocks mined by unrecog-
nized pools.
B. Ethereum
We ran an Ethereum full node implemented in Go language
[19] and retrieved data via the JSON RPC API. To be
consistent, we analyzed data of the same time range (January
1, 2017 to July 31, 2018) as we did for Bitcoin. Figure 6
depicts that pool-mined blocks increased from 76.9% in June
2017 to 92.2% in October 20173 . The increase in pool-mined
blocks co-occurred with the first surge in Ethereum price [21]4 .
Thereafter, more than 90% of blocks were mined by pools
every month. In July 2018, five pools collectively mined 82.7%
of all 182526 blocks as shown in Figure 7. These data suggest
that Ethereum suffered more from centralization than Bitcoin.
VI. R ELATED W ORK
Narayanan et al. [2] and Rosenfeld [5] mentioned that the
number of blocks mined in a fixed time interval conformed
3 Block count dropped between March 2017 and September 2019 due to
the hard fork Byzantium [20].
4 The non-pool portion in Figure 6 may contain blocks mined by unrecog-
nized pools.

47
 
 VII. C ONCLUSION
!
"

 
!
" In this paper, we established a Poisson process model for




 PoW mining and validated the model with Bitcoin data. Based


on the model, we introduced the concept of equivalent blocks
and quantitatively derived that income variance is inversely


proportional to the pool size that a miner participates in,

 whereas the expected income is hardly affected by pooling.

 Low income variance incentivizes miners to pool and this fact

 has been demonstrated by real-world data from both Bitcoin










































































and Ethereum. As a pool manager verifies transactions on
behalf of all participants, the data analysis results confirmed
 that decentralization is a real challenge facing blockchains.

Fig. 6. Number of pool-mined and non-pool-mined Ethereum blocks from

R EFERENCES
January 2017 to July 2018 [1] S. Nakamoto, “Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system,” 2008.
[2] A. Narayanan, J. Bonneau, E. Felten, A. Miller, and S. Goldfeder,
Bitcoin and cryptocurrency technologies: a comprehensive introduction.
Princeton University Press, 2016.
[3] Btc.com, “Pool Stats - BTC.com,”
EthPool_2
Ethermine https://btc.com/stats/pool?pool mode=all, accessed: 2018-12-13.
[4] Etherscan, “Hash Rate Distribution,”
F2pool_2 https://etherscan.io/stat/miner?range=7&blocktype=blocks, accessed:
0.9% 2018-06-01.
28.4% [5] M. Rosenfeld, “Analysis of bitcoin pooled mining reward systems,”
15.1% arXiv preprint arXiv:1112.4980, 2011.
PandaPool
BitClubPool WaterholePool [6] Bitcoin.it, “Comparison of mining pools,”
1.8% MaxHash
2.0% FirePool https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Comparison of mining pools, accessed:
MinerAllPool 2018-04-24.
9.9% AntPool
7.9% 2miners [7] B. A. Forouzan, Cryptography & network security. McGraw-Hill, Inc.,
MiningPoolHub Other miners 2007.
1.1% 1.7%
[8] D. R. Stinson, Cryptography: theory and practice. Chapman and
11.7% Hall/CRC, 2005.
Coinotron_3 2.0% 17.6% BW
[9] C. E. Shannon, “Communication theory of secrecy systems,” Bell system
technical journal, vol. 28, no. 4, pp. 656–715, 1949.
NanoPool [10] C. Decker and R. Wattenhofer, “Information propagation in the bitcoin
SparkPool network,” in IEEE P2P 2013 Proceedings. IEEE, 2013, pp. 1–10.
DwarfPool_1 [11] A. Gervais, G. O. Karame, K. Wüst, V. Glykantzis, H. Ritzdorf,
and S. Capkun, “On the security and performance of proof of work
blockchains,” in Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC conference on
Fig. 7. Ethereum block distribution among miners in July 2018. Pool names computer and communications security. ACM, 2016, pp. 3–16.
are collected from [15] and [16]. [12] K. Krishnamoorthy, Handbook of statistical distributions with applica-
tions. Chapman and Hall/CRC, 2016.
[13] Bitcoin Core Developers, “Bitcoin Core integration/staging tree,”
https://github.com/bitcoin/bitcoin, accessed: 2019-04-09.
[14] Bitcoin.org, “Target nBits,” https://bitcoin.org/en/developer-
to the Poisson distribution, but they did not validate their reference#target-nbits, accessed: 2018.
argument with real blockchain data. The article by Gencer [15] Etherscan, “Mining Pools,” https://etherscan.io/directory/Mining/Min-
et al. [17] provides the weekly distribution of hashing power ing Pools, accessed: 2019-04-07.
[16] Etherchain, “Etherchain - The Ethereum Blockchain Explorer,”
in Bitcoin and Ethereum without distinguishing between solo https://www.etherchain.org/, accessed: 2019-04-07.
miners and mining pools, whereas we clearly show pooling [17] A. E. Gencer, S. Basu, I. Eyal, R. Van Renesse, and E. G. Sirer,
gained popularity in late 2017. Bowden et al. [22] presented “Decentralization in bitcoin and ethereum networks,” arXiv preprint
arXiv:1801.03998, 2018.
a point process model in which the block arrival process be- [18] Coinbase, “Bitcoin Price,” https://www.coinbase.com/price/bitcoin, ac-
haved as a nonhomogeneous Poisson process to take difficulty cessed: 2019-04-10.
changes into account. Lewenberg et al. [23] also employed [19] Go-ethereum Authors, “Go Ethereum,” https://github.com/ethereum/go-
ethereum, accessed: 2019-04-09.
a Poisson process model when analyzing pools from a game [20] Ethereum Foundation, “Byzantium HF Announcement,”
theory perspective. https://blog.ethereum.org/2017/10/12/byzantium-hf-announcement/,
accessed: 2019-04-08.
Unlike previous works, we showed that our Poisson pro- [21] Coinbase, “Ethereum Price,” https://www.coinbase.com/price/ethereum,
cess model applied to not only the global network but also accessed: 2019-04-11.
individual miners and pools. We also quantitatively compared [22] R. Bowden, H. P. Keeler, A. E. Krzesinski, and P. G. Taylor, “Block
arrivals in the bitcoin blockchain,” arXiv preprint arXiv:1801.07447,
the solo-mining income and pooled-mining income of a miner, 2018.
and draw the conclusion that pool sizes affect income variance. [23] Y. Lewenberg, Y. Bachrach, Y. Sompolinsky, A. Zohar, and J. S.
Moreover, we captured the time period when pooled mining Rosenschein, “Bitcoin mining pools: A cooperative game theoretic
analysis,” in Proceedings of the 2015 International Conference on
became more and more popular and visually demonstrated how Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems. International Foundation
centralized Bitcoin and Ethereum are with real-world data. for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, 2015, pp. 919–927.

48