Related papers: Bitcoin Mining Decentralization via Cost Analysis
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…
The objective of this paper is the construction of new indicators that can be useful to operate in the cryptocurrency market. These indicators are based on public data obtained from the blockchain network, specifically from the nodes that…
Cryptocurrencies have gained tremendous popularity over the past few years. The purpose of this study is to try to understand the factors that are driving cryptocurrency-related trading activities. Focusing on the well-established…
Selfish miners selectively withhold blocks to earn disproportionately high revenue. The vast majority of the selfish mining literature focuses exclusively on block rewards. Carlsten et al. [2016] is a notable exception, observing that…
A blockchain, such as Bitcoin, is an append-only, secure, transparent, distributed ledger. A fair blockchain is expected to have healthy metrics; high honest mining power, low processing latency, i.e., low wait times for transactions and…
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?…
We study to what extent the Bitcoin blockchain security permanently depends on the underlying distribution of cryptocurrency market outcomes. We use daily blockchain and Bitcoin data for 2014-2019 and employ the ARDL approach. We test three…
We calculate the probability of success of block-hiding mining strategies in Bitcoin-like networks. These strategies involve building a secret branch of the block-tree and publishing it opportunistically, aiming to replace the top of the…
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…
Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency that records alltransactions in a distributed append-only public ledger calledblockchain. The security of Bitcoin heavily relies on the incentive-compatible proof-of-work (PoW) based distributed consensus…
The energy sustainability of blockchains, whose consensus protocol rests on the Proof-of-Work, nourishes a heated debate. The underlying issue lies in a highly energy-consuming process, defined as mining, required to validate crypto-asset…
We propose a bitcoin generalization as a solution to the problem of scalability. The block is redefined as a sequence of sub-blocks of increasing sizes that coexist as different levels of compromise between decentralization and transactions…
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
Abrupt changes in the miner hash rate applied to a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain can adversely affect user experience and security. Because different PoW blockchains often share hashing algorithms, miners face a complex choice in deciding…
In a Proof-of-Work blockchain such as Bitcoin mining hashrate is increasing in the block reward. An increase in hashrate reduces network vulnerability to attack (a reduction in security cost) while increasing carbon emissions and…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus is traditionally analyzed under the assumption that all miners incur similar costs per unit of computational effort. In reality, costs vary due to factors such as regional electricity cost differences and…
We review the so called selfish mining strategy in the Bitcoin network and compare its profitability to honest mining.We build a rigorous profitability model for repetition games. The time analysis of the attack has been ignored in the…
The Bitcoin protocol prescribes certain behavior by the miners who are responsible for maintaining and extending the underlying blockchain; in particular, miners who successfully solve a puzzle, and hence can extend the chain by a block,…
Cryptocurrency mining processes always lead to a high energy consumption at considerably high production cost, which is nearly one-third of cryptocurrency (e.g. Bitcoin) price itself. As the core of mining process is based on SHA-256…
Cryptocurrency exchanges are frequently targeted and compromised by cyber-attacks, which may lead to significant losses for the depositors and closure of the affected exchanges. These risks threaten the viability of the entire public…