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Recently, there has been a remarkable amount of research being done in both, the fields of Blockchain and Internet of Things (IoT). Blockchain technology synergises well with IoT, solving key problems such as privacy, concerns with…
Blockchain is a distributed ledger, which is protected against malicious modifications by means of cryptographic tools, e.g. digital signatures and hash functions. One of the most prominent applications of blockchains is cryptocurrencies,…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…
The core of many cryptocurrencies is the decentralised validation network operating on proof-of-work technology. In these systems, validation is done by so-called miners who can digitally sign blocks once they solve a computationally-hard…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…
Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this…
The arisen of Bitcoin has led to much enthusiasm for blockchain research and block mining, and the extensive existence of mining pools helps its participants (i.e., miners) gain reward more frequently. Recently, the mining pools are proved…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom…
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…
GHOST, like the longest-chain protocol, is a chain selection protocol and its capability in resisting selfish mining attack has been validated in imperfect blockchains of Bitcoin and its variants (Bitcoin-like). This paper explores an…
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…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain…
Bitcoin provides freshness properties by forming a blockchain where each block is associated with its timestamp and the previous block. Due to these properties, the Bitcoin protocol is being used as a decentralized, trusted, and secure…
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…
Mining attacks enable an adversary to procure a disproportionately large portion of mining rewards by deviating from honest mining practices within the PoW-based blockchain system. In this paper, we demonstrate that the security…
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…
There is a resurgence of interest in Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) systems due to blockchains. However, leader-based BFT consensus protocols used by permissioned blockchains have limited scalability and robustness. To alleviate the leader…
In this paper we revisit the mining strategies in proof of work based cryptocurrencies and propose two strategies, we call smart and smarter mining, that in many cases strictly dominate honest mining. In contrast to other known attacks,…
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…
We design and validate new block propagation protocols for the peer-to-peer (P2P) network of the Bitcoin blockchain. Despite its strong protection for security and privacy, the current Bitcoin blockchain can only support a low number of…