<p>Block verification is very important in order to get people to agree on blockchain systems that use Proof-of-Work (PoW). In platforms like Ethereum, miners don’t get paid directly for verifying transactions. This is called the Verifier’s Dilemma since miners have to choose between putting their computing power toward honest verification or more profitable mining activities. This paper provides a comprehensive analysis of the Verifier’s Dilemma and its consequences for the fairness and efficacy of decentralized networks, especially those that provide nascent Internet of Things (IoT) security frameworks. Data from around 200,000 smart contracts has been utilized to model the costs of verification in the actual world. This data includes the CPU execution times of the contracts. Gaussian Mixture Models is used to improve these data distributions, and XGBoost is used to estimate CPU time from Used Gas values. This made it possible to simulate verification behavior in a realistic way. Three mitigation strategies–parallelization, deliberate invalid-block insertion, and the integration of ommer blocks are analyzed in order to determine their efficacy in diminishing miners’ incentives to avoid verification. Our results show that the severity of the Verifier’s Dilemma is greatly affected by the choice of mitigation method and other factors like miner hash power and ommer block rates. These findings not only help us understand how verification works in PoW blockchains, but they also help us design secure and durable blockchain-based IoT systems, where integrity, transparency, and strong consensus are all important.</p>