Related papers: Bitcoin Mining Decentralization via Cost Analysis
The security of Bitcoin protocols is deeply dependent on the incentives provided to miners, which come from a combination of block rewards and transaction fees. As Bitcoin experiences more halving events, the protocol reward converges to…
Many blockchain systems today, including Bitcoin, rely on Proof of Work (PoW). Proof of work is crucial to the liveness and security of cryptocurrencies. The assumption when using PoW is that a lot of trial and error is required on average…
In cryptocurrencies, the block reward is meant to serve as the incentive mechanism for miners to commit resources to create blocks and in effect secure the system. Existing systems primarily divide the reward in proportion to expended…
Seminal work of Eyal and Sirer (2014) establishes that a strategic Bitcoin miner may strictly profit by deviating from the intended Bitcoin protocol, using a strategy now termed *selfish mining*. More specifically, any miner with $>1/3$ of…
A cryptocurrency is a decentralized digital currency that is designed for secure and private asset transfer and storage. As a currency, it should be difficult to counterfeit and double-spend. In this paper, we review and analyze the major…
We study the strategic considerations of miners participating in the bitcoin's protocol. We formulate and study the stochastic game that underlies these strategic considerations. The miners collectively build a tree of blocks, and they are…
We describe and analyze perishing mining, a novel block-withholding mining strategy that lures profit-driven miners away from doing useful work on the public chain by releasing block headers from a privately maintained chain. We then…
The application of Bitcoin enables people to understand blockchain technology gradually. Bitcoin is a decentralized currency that does not rely on third-party credit institutions, and the core of Bitcoin's underlying technology is…
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…
Decentralized cryptocurrency networks, notably those with high energy demand, have faced significant criticism and subsequent regulatory scrutiny. Despite these concerns, policy interventions targeting cryptocurrency operations in the…
Despite their potential in many respects, blockchain and distributed ledger technology (DLT) technology have been the target of criticism for the energy intensity of the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm in general and of Bitcoin…
Bitcoin is a digital currency designed to rely on a decentralized, trustless network of anonymous agents. Using a pseudonymous-address-linking procedure that achieves >99% sensitivity and >99% specificity, we reveal that between launch…
One of the fundamental applications for a practically useful system of money is remuneration. Information pertaining to the amount of compensation awarded to different individuals is often considered sensitive, commanding a certain degree…
This paper investigates whether Bitcoin can be regarded as a decentralized autonomous organization (DAO), what insights it may offer for the broader DAO ecosystem, and how Bitcoin governance can be improved. First, a quantitative literature…
In this study, we examine the behavior and profitability of modern malware that mines cryptocurrency. Unlike previous studies, we look at the cryptocurrency market as a whole, rather than just Bitcoin. We not only consider PCs, but also…
We study the strategic implications that arise from adding one extra option to the miners participating in the bitcoin protocol. We propose that when adding a block, miners also have the ability to pay forward an amount to be collected by…
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain networks have attracted tremendous attention from their volatile price movements and the promise of decentralization. However, most projects run on business narratives with no way to test and verify their…
Many of today's crypto currencies use blockchains as decentralized ledgers and secure them with proof of work. In case of a fork of the chain, Bitcoin's rule for achieving consensus is selecting the longest chain and discarding the other…
For more than a decade, Bitcoin has gained as much adoption as it has received criticism. Fundamentally, Bitcoin is under fire for the high carbon footprint that results from the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm.…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…