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N. Stifter, P. Schindler, A. Judmayer, A. Zamyatin, A. Kern, E. Weippl:
"Echoes of the Past: Recovering Blockchain Metrics from Merged mining";
Talk: 23rd International Conference, FC 2019, St. Kitts; 2019-02-18 - 2019-02-22; in: "Financial Cryptography and Data Security", Springer, (2019), ISBN: 978-3-030-32101-7.

So far, the topic of merged mining has mainly been considered in a
security context, covering issues such as mining power centralization or crosschain attack scenarios. In this work we show that key information for determining
blockchain metrics such as the fork rate can be recovered through data extracted
from merge mined cryptocurrencies. Specifically, we reconstruct a long-ranging
view of forks and stale blocks in Bitcoin from its merge mined child chains, and
compare our results to previous findings that were derived from live measurements. Thereby, we show that live monitoring alone is not sufficient to capture a
large majority of these events, as we are able to identify a non-negligible portion
of stale blocks that were previously unaccounted for. Their authenticity is ensured by cryptographic evidence regarding both, their position in the respective
blockchain, as well as the Proof-of-Work difficulty.
Furthermore, by applying this new technique to Litecoin and its child cryptocurrencies, we are able to provide the first extensive view and lower bound on the
stale block and fork rate in the Litecoin network. Finally, we outline that a recovery of other important metrics and blockchain characteristics through merged
mining may also be possible.