Related papers: Be Selfish and Avoid Dilemmas: Fork After Withhold…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies secure a decentralized consensus protocol by incentives. The protocol participants, called miners, generate (mine) a series of blocks, each containing monetary transactions created by system users. As…
We present a strategy for a single quantum miner with relatively low hashing power, with the same ramifications as a 51% attack. Bitcoin nodes consider the chain with the highest cumulative proof-of-work to be the valid chain. A quantum…
We analyze Qubic's publicly claimed selfish mining attack against Monero in 2025. By combining measurements from Monero nodes, the Qubic pool API, and Qubic-network observations, we reconstruct Qubic-attributed blocks and effective hashrate…
Proof of work (PoW), as the representative consensus protocol for blockchain, consumes enormous amounts of computation and energy to determine bookkeeping rights among miners but does not achieve any practical purposes. To address the…
Bitcoin is the first of its kind, a truly decentralized and anonymous cryptocurrency. To realize it, it has developed blockchain technology using the concept of `Proof of Work' (PoW). The miners, nodes responsible for writing transaction…
Incentive mechanisms are central to the functionality of permissionless blockchains: they incentivize participants to run and secure the underlying consensus protocol. Designing incentive-compatible incentive mechanisms is notoriously…
Proof of work (PoW), the most popular consensus mechanism for Blockchain, requires ridiculously large amounts of energy but without any useful outcome beyond determining accounting rights among miners. To tackle the drawback of PoW, we…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular blockchain consensus algorithm that is used in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in which hashing operations are repeated until the resulting hash has certain properties. This approach uses lots of computational…
Stratum, the de-facto mining communication protocol used by blockchain based cryptocurrency systems, enables miners to reliably and efficiently fetch jobs from mining pool servers. In this paper we exploit Stratum's lack of encryption to…
As the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and today's biggest decentralized platform that runs smart contracts, Ethereum has received much attention from both industry and academia. Nevertheless, there exist very few…
Bitcoin mining presents a significant economic incentive for efficient hashing and broadcast of data, both parameters stemming from the Proofs of Work used to advance the network. This incentive has led to the development of Bitcoin…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
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…
We analyze Bitcoin mining from the perspective of a game and propose an optimal mining model that maximizes profits of pools and miners. The model is a two-stage Stackelberg game in which each stage forms a sub-game. In stage I, pools are…
Following the publication of Bitcoin's arguably most famous attack, selfish mining, various works have introduced mechanisms to enhance blockchain systems' game theoretic resilience. Some reward mechanisms, like FruitChains, have been shown…
Mining blocks in a blockchain using the \textit{Proof-of-Work} consensus protocol involves significant risk, as network participants face continuous operational costs while earning infrequent capital gains upon successfully mining a block.…
A proof of work (PoW) is an important cryptographic construct enabling a party to convince others that they invested some effort in solving a computational task. Arguably, its main impact has been in the setting of cryptocurrencies such as…
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…
Bitcoin is a representative decentralized currency system. For the security of Bitcoin, fairness in the distribution of mining rewards plays a crucial role in preventing the concentration of computational power in a few miners. Here,…
Selfish mining, which is an attack on the integrity of the Bitcoin network, was first proposed by Cornell researchers Emin Gun Sirer and Ittay Eyal in 2013. Selfish mining attack also exists in most Nakamoto consensus protocols. Generally…