Group bargaining based bitcoin mining scheme using incentive payment process

Bitcoin is a digital cryptocurrency that has generated considerable public interests through a fully decentralised network with an inherently independence from governments or any central authorities. Although its short history has been volatile, the Bitcoin maintains a core group of committed users. In this study, we look at the Bitcoin complex structure and design a new Bitcoin mining protocol while developing a novel incentive payment process. To effectively implement an incentive payment mechanism, we adopt the concept of the group bargaining solution by considering a peer-to-peer relationship, and it is practically applied to a distributed computation network system. Based on the cooperative game model, we explore an efficient solution that can maximise Bitcoin users' rewards. Through system level simulations, the proposed scheme is evaluated and compared with other existing schemes. The simulation results show that our group bargaining game approach outperforms the existing Bitcoin schemes in providing a better fair-efficient system performance. Copyright (c) 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.