Attacks
Mining pools are the backbone of Proof-of-Work systems like Bitcoin, allowing miners to reduce variance by aggregating hashpower and sharing rewards. However, pooled mining introduces a long-standing and well-documented vulnerability: Block Withholding Attacks (BWAs). In these attacks, a malicious miner submits valid low-difficulty shares while selectively withholding full-difficulty blocks, silently reducing the pool’s block revenue without leaving cryptographic evidence of misbehavior.
The root of the problem is structural. In conventional PoW systems, successful work is publicly verifiable, but unsuccessful search effort leaves no trace. As a result, pools must rely on long-term statistics and probabilistic inference to detect withholding, a method that is slow, imprecise, and especially fragile in decentralized or trust-minimized pool designs.
This research introduces APoW ( Auditable Proof-of-Work), a novel PoW construction that adds auditability as a first-class property, without relying on trusted hardware, interactive protocols, or centralized pool secrets. APoW enables miners to probabilistically attest to having searched specific regions of the nonce space in prior mining rounds, while simultaneously performing new mining work. In practice, this means that past mining efforts can be audited retroactively and verifiably.
At the core of APoW is the concept of v-mining (verification mining). A miner can be assigned to re-scan the same nonce space previously explored by another miner, using a modified PoW condition based on pattern matching rather than leading zeros. If a miner claims to have searched a region honestly, APoW makes it statistically likely that withheld block solutions will be detected during this verification phase.
Unlike prior approaches, such as oblivious shares, APoW does not require hiding block validity from miners, nor does it concentrate power in the hands of a pool operator. Instead, it supports decentralized mining pool architectures, where work attribution is verifiable and withholding incentives are significantly reduced.
While APoW requires a consensus-level change and presents deployment challenges for existing ASICs, it opens a new design space for Proof-of-Work systems: one where mining effort itself becomes auditable, enabling stronger security guarantees and more robust decentralized coordination.
Read the 🔗full paper here
