Monitoring the transaction selection policy of Bitcoin mining pools

Mining pools are collection of workers that work together as a group in order to collaborate in the proof of work and reduce the variance of their rewards when mining. In order to achieve this, Mining pools distribute amongst the workers the task of finding a block so that each worker works on a different subset of the candidate solutions. In most mining pools the selection of transactions to be part of the next block is performed by the pool manager and thus becomes more centralized. A mining Pool is expected to give priority to the most lucrative transactions in order to increase the block reward however changes to the transaction policy done without notification of workers would be difficult to detect. In this paper we treat the transaction selection policy performed by miners as a classification problem; for each block we create a dataset, separate them by mining pool and apply feature selection techniques to extract a vector of importance for each feature. We then track variations in feature importance as new blocks arrive and show using a generated scenario how a change in policy by a mining pool could be detected.