Related papers: Optimal Selfish Mining Strategies in Bitcoin
What are the optimal times for an Internet of Things (IoT) device to act as a blockchain miner? The aim is to minimize the energy consumed by low-power IoT devices that log their data into a secure (tamper-proof) distributed ledger. We…
As the most successful cryptocurrency to date, Bitcoin constitutes a target of choice for attackers. While many attack vectors have already been uncovered, one important vector has been left out though: attacking the currency via the…
Proof of work cryptocurrencies began with the promise of a more egalitarian future with a decentralized monetary system with no powerful entities in charge. While this vision is far from realized, these cryptocurrencies are still touted to…
The year 2024 witnessed a major development in the cryptocurrency industry with the long-awaited approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This innovation provides investors with a new, regulated path to gain exposure to…
We develop a dynamic model of the Bitcoin market where users set fees themselves and miners decide whether to operate and whom to validate based on those fees. Our analysis reveals how, in equilibrium, users adjust their bids in response to…
Bitcoin is firmly becoming a mainstream asset in our global society. Its highly volatile nature has traders and speculators flooding into the market to take advantage of its significant price swings in the hope of making money. This work…
All public blockchains are secured by a proof of opportunity cost among block producers. For example, the security offered by proof-of-work (PoW) systems, like Bitcoin, is due to spent computation; it is work precisely because it cannot be…
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…
The aim of this work is to enhance blockchain security by deepening the understanding of selfish mining attacks in various consensus protocols, especially the ones that have the potential to mitigate selfish mining. Previous research was…
Proof-of-work computation used in cryptocurrencies has witnessed significant growth in the U.S. and many other regions around the world. One of the most significant bottlenecks for the scalable deployment of such computation is its energy…
Blockchain systems often employ proof-of-work consensus protocols to validate and add transactions into hashchains. These protocols stimulate competition among miners in solving cryptopuzzles (e.g. SHA-256 hash computation in Bitcoin) in…
Blockchain security is threatened by selfish mining, where a miner (operator) deviates from the protocol to increase their revenue. Selfish mining is exacerbated by adverse conditions: rushing (network propagation advantage for the selfish…
Cryptocurrencies employ auction-esque transaction fee mechanisms (TFMs) to allocate transactions to blocks, and to determine how much fees miners can collect from transactions. Several impossibility results show that TFMs that satisfy a…
Soon after its introduction in 2009, Bitcoin has been adopted by cyber-criminals, which rely on its pseudonymity to implement virtually untraceable scams. One of the typical scams that operate on Bitcoin are the so-called Ponzi schemes.…
Mining in proof-of-work blockchains has become an expensive affair requiring specialized hardware capable of executing several megahashes per second at huge electricity costs. Miners earn a reward each time they mine a block within the…
The blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain record the amount of work W that went into creating them through proofs of work. When honest parties control a majority of the work, consensus is achieved by picking the chain with the highest recorded…
This paper integrates Austrian capital theory with repeated game theory to examine strategic miner behaviour under different institutional conditions in blockchain systems. It shows that when protocol rules are mutable, effective time…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular consensus protocol used by Bitcoin since its inception. PoW has the well-known flaw of assigning all the reward to the single miner (or pool) that inserts the new block. This has the consequence of making…
The digital currency Bitcoin has had remarkable growth since it was first proposed in 2008. Its distributed nature allows currency transactions without a central authority by using cryptographic methods and a data structure called the…
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…