From Single-Stage Penalty to Sustained Deterrence: A Threshold-Based Analysis of 51% Attack Governance in IoT-Enabled Blockchain Systems

The integration of blockchain technology into the Internet of Things (IoT) offers a decentralized paradigm for data integrity. However, the emergence of 51% attacks—driven by hashrate concentration—threatens the foundational trust of these resource-constrained networks. In resource-constrained IoT-enabled blockchain environments, mining-power asymmetry and limited governance capability may amplify the impact of strategic attacks. These characteristics motivate the need to analyze long-term adversarial behavior and governance effectiveness under repeated interactions. This paper develops a threshold-based analytical framework that integrates a single-stage decision model and a multi-stage discounted decision model to analyze 51% attack decisions and governance effects in asymmetric blockchain mining environments. We characterize the interaction between competing mining pools as a multi-stage game, integrating key parameters such as the discount factor of future utility and recovery penalty cycles. Our analysis demonstrates that a multi-stage framework creates a “long-term deterrent effect” where the net present value of potential future losses outweighs the immediate gains of hashrate abuse. analytical results indicate that the strategic threshold for launching an attack is highly sensitive to the duration of punitive measures and the accuracy of IoT-based anomaly detection. The results provide useful insights into the design of governance and incentive mechanisms for blockchain systems deployed in resource-constrained and heterogeneous environments.