Related papers: The Miner's Dilemma
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography which has recently gained excessive popularity. Scientific research on bitcoin is less abundant. A paper at Financial Cryptography 2012…
Most public blockchain protocols, including the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, do not formally specify the order in which miners should select transactions from the pool of pending (or uncommitted) transactions for inclusion in…
Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by miners to steal block rewards. In this paper, we explore a new form of selfish mining attack that guarantees high rewards with low cost. We show the feasibility of…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency has received much attention recently. In the network of Bitcoin, transactions are recorded in a ledger. In this network, the process of recording transactions depends on some nodes called miners that execute a…
We initiate the study of quantum races, games where two or more quantum computers compete to solve a computational problem. While the problem of dueling algorithms has been studied for classical deterministic algorithms, the quantum case…
Cryptocurrencies, arguably the most prominent application of blockchains, have been on the rise with a wide mainstream acceptance. A central concept in cryptocurrencies is "mining pools", groups of cooperating cryptocurrency miners who…
Proof-of-stake (PoS) is a promising approach for designing efficient blockchains, where block proposers are randomly chosen with probability proportional to their stake. A primary concern with PoS systems is the "rich getting richer"…
In 2015, Eyal proposed the first game-theoretical model for analyzing the equilibrium of blockchain pooling: when the blockchain pools are abstracted as a non-cooperative game, two pools can reach a Nash equilibrium with a closed-form…
Blockchain is a distributed ledger, which is protected against malicious modifications by means of cryptographic tools, e.g. digital signatures and hash functions. One of the most prominent applications of blockchains is cryptocurrencies,…
We propose a mean field game model to study the question of how centralization of reward and computational power occur in Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies. Miners compete against each other for mining rewards by increasing their computational…
We study selfish mining in Ethereum. The problem is combinatorially more complex than in Bitcoin because of major differences in the reward system and a different difficulty adjustment formula. Equivalent strategies in Bitcoin do have…
We introduce and study reward sharing schemes (RSS) that promote the fair formation of {\em stake pools}\ in collaborative projects that involve a large number of stakeholders such as the maintenance of a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.…
The goal of this paper is to establish the general framework of consensus equilibria for Mining-Pool Games in Blockchain Ecosystems, and with the explanation for the stability of in terms of the existence of consensus equilibria related to…
Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain PoW consensus on how the existence of multiple misbehaving miners influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner (or attacker interchangeably)…
In the area of blockchain, numerous methods have been proposed for suppressing intentional forks by attackers more effectively than the random rule. However, all of them, except for the random rule, require major updates, rely on a trusted…
Bitcoin is the first implementation of what has become known as a 'public permissionless' blockchain. Guaranteeing security and protocol conformity through its elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoretic economic…
Proof-of-work blockchains reward each miner for one completed block by an amount that is, in expectation, proportional to the number of hashes the miner contributed to the mining of the block. Is this proportional allocation rule optimal?…
Blockchain stores information into a chain of "blocks", whose integrity is usually guaranteed by Proof of Work (PoW). In many blockchain applications (including cryptocurrencies), users compete with each other to win the ownership of the…