Bitcoin Miner Transaction Fee Gathering Capability

Abstract In this report we discuss a new proposed mining pool, expected to censor certain transactions. This may result in a detectable diversion from the typical revenue maximisation transaction selection policy, which forms the basis of our analysis.Using the Bitcoin Core command “getblocktemplate”, we generated Bitcoin candidate blocks without doing any hashing, conducting this every 20 seconds for a two week period and recording the results in a database. We used multiple versions of Bitcoin Core and newer releases of Bitcoin Core experienced a 40.3% fee income improvement, when compared to a 2015 version. We also benchmarked our results against the real Bitcoin network and we were able to beat the real Bitcoin miners by generating 0.15% more in hypothetical fee income. This type of analysis may eventually be helpful in detecting miner censorship and determining whether Bitcoin’s censorship resistance property is a universal property of the system or merely a consequence of the transaction fee premium.