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A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…
One decade ago, Bitcoin was introduced, becoming the first cryptocurrency and establishing the concept of "blockchain" as a distributed ledger. As of today, there are many different implementations of cryptocurrencies working over a…
Half a decade after Bitcoin became the first widely used cryptocurrency, blockchains are receiving considerable interest from industry and the research community. Modern blockchains feature services such as name registration and smart…
Fault-tolerant distributed systems move the trust in a single party to a majority of parties participating in the protocol. This makes blockchain based crypto-currencies possible: they allow parties to agree on a total order of transactions…
The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its…
The security of most existing cryptocurrencies is based on a concept called Proof-of-Work, in which users must solve a computationally hard cryptopuzzle to authorize transactions (`one unit of computation, one vote'). This leads to enormous…
Authcoin is an alternative approach to the commonly used public key infrastructures such as central authorities and the PGP web of trust. It combines a challenge response-based validation and authentication process for domains,…
Cryptocurrencies have garnered a lot of attention by governments and internet enthusiasts over the past three years. These currencies are celebrated for their security and speedy transactions in a modern era of digital commerce. Bitcoin was…
The idea of security sharing goes back to Nakamoto's introduction of merge mining, a technique that enables Bitcoin miners to reuse their hash power to bootstrap and secure other Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. However, with the rise of…
While cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications continue to gain popularity, their energy cost is evidently becoming unsustainable. In most instances, the main cost comes from the required amount of energy for the Proof-of-Work, and this…
Bitcoin is the first of its kind, a truly decentralized and anonymous cryptocurrency. To realize it, it has developed blockchain technology using the concept of `Proof of Work' (PoW). The miners, nodes responsible for writing transaction…
The Bitcoin system only provides eventual consistency. For everyday life, the time to confirm a Bitcoin transaction is prohibitively slow. In this paper we propose a new system, built on the Bitcoin blockchain, which enables strong…
We propose a proof-of-work algorithm that rewards blockchain miners for using computational resources to solve NP-complete puzzles. The resulting blockchain will publicly store and improve solutions to problems with real world applications…
Today's world is organized based on merit and value. A single global currency that's decentralized is needed for a global economy. Bitcoin is a partial solution to this need, however it suffers from scalability problems which prevent it…
Since the invention of Bitcoin one decade ago, numerous cryptocurrencies have sprung into existence. Among these, proof-of-work is the most common mechanism for achieving consensus, whilst a number of coins have adopted "ASIC-resistance" as…
Current cryptocurrencies, starting with Bitcoin, build a decentralized blockchain-based transaction ledger, maintained through proofs-of-work that also generate a monetary supply. Such decentralization has benefits, such as independence…
We study decentralized cryptocurrency protocols in which the participants do not deplete physical scarce resources. Such protocols commonly rely on Proof of Stake, i.e., on mechanisms that extend voting power to the stakeholders of the…
Does the proof-of-work protocol serve its intended purpose of supporting decentralized cryptocurrency mining? To address this question, we develop a game-theoretical model where miners first invest in hardware to improve the efficiency of…
Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, while central to achieving decentralized consensus, has long been criticized for excessive energy use and hardware inefficiencies \cite{devries2018bitcoin, truby2018decarbonizing}. This paper…
In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto proposed an electronic cash system (bitcoin) that is completely realized by peer-to-peer technology. The core value of this scheme is that it proposes a solution based on Proof-of Work, so that the cash system can…