Though blockchain aims to alleviate bribing attacks, users can collude with
miners by directly sending bribes. This paper focuses on empirical evidence of
bribes to miners, and the detected behaviour implies that mining power could be
exploited. By scanning transactions on Ethereum, transactions for potential
direct bribes are filtered, and we find that the potential bribers and bribees
are centralized in a small group. After constructing proxies of active level of
potential bribing, we find that potential bribes can affect the status of
Ethereum and other mainstream blockchains, and network adoption of blockchain
can be influenced as well. Besides, direct bribes can be related to stock
markets, e.g., S&P 500 and Nasdaq.
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