Related papers: Socially Optimal Mining Pools
The selfish mining attack, arguably the most famous game-theoretic attack in blockchain, indicates that the Bitcoin protocol is not incentive-compatible. Most subsequent works mainly focus on strengthening the selfish mining strategy, thus…
Eyal and Sirer's selfish mining strategy has demonstrated that Bitcoin system is not secure even if 50% of total mining power is held by altruistic miners. Since then, researchers have been investigating either to improve the efficiency of…
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"…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
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…
The pool-hopping attack casts down the expected profits of both the mining pool and honest miners in Blockchain. The mainstream countermeasures, namely PPS (pay-per-share) and PPLNS (pay-per-last-N-share), can hedge pool hopping, but pose a…
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…
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 mining of bitcoin is modeled using system dynamics, showing that the past evolution of the network hash rate can be explained to a large extent by an efficient market hypothesis applied to the mining of blocks. The possibility of a…
The consensus protocol named proof of work (PoW) is widely applied by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Although security of a PoW cryptocurrency is always the top priority, it is threatened by mining attacks like selfish mining. Researchers…
Bitcoin's security relies on its Proof-of-Work consensus, where miners solve puzzles to propose blocks. The puzzle's difficulty is set by the difficulty adjustment mechanism (DAM), based on the network's available mining power. Attacks that…
The security of blockchain systems based on Proof of Work relies on mining. However, mining suffers from unstable revenue, prompting many miners to form cooperative mining pools. Most existing mining pools operate in a centralized manner,…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely adopted incentive model in current blockchain systems, which unfortunately is energy inefficient. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is then proposed to tackle the energy issue. The rich-get-richer concern of PoS…
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…
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…
Bitcoin-NG is an extensible blockchain protocol based on the same trust model as Bitcoin. It divides each epoch into one Key-Block and multiple Micro-Blocks, effectively improving transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG adopts a special…
Cryptocurrencies that are based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) often rely on special purpose hardware to perform so-called mining operations that secure the system, with miners receiving freshly minted tokens as a reward for their work. A notable…
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…
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…
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…