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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…
Decentralized systems built around blockchain technology promise clients an immutable ledger. They add a transaction to the ledger after it undergoes consensus among the replicas that run a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) or Byzantine Fault-Tolerant…
Blockchain systems benefit from lessons in prior art such as fault tolerance, distributed systems, peer-to-peer systems, and game theory. In this paper we argue that blockchain algorithms should tolerate both rational (self-interested)…
An attacker who breaks into an authentication server and steals all of the cryptographic password hashes is able to mount an offline-brute force attack against each user's password. Offline brute-force attacks against passwords are…
Most cryptocurrencies rely on Proof-of-Work (PoW) "mining" for resistance to Sybil and double-spending attacks, as well as a mechanism for currency issuance. Hashcash PoW has successfully secured the Bitcoin network since its inception,…
Mining blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol is well-known to be resource-consuming. A miner bears the operational cost, mainly electricity consumption and IT gear, of mining, and is compensated by a…
Low transaction throughput and poor scalability are significant issues in public blockchain consensus protocols such as Bitcoins. Recent research efforts in this direction have proposed shard-based consensus protocols where the key idea is…
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…
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,…
In this paper we describe the various scoring systems used to calculate rewards of participants in Bitcoin pooled mining, explain the problems each were designed to solve and analyze their respective advantages and disadvantages.
Blockchain plays a crucial role in ensuring the security and integrity of decentralized systems, with the proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism being fundamental for achieving distributed consensus. As PoW blockchains see broader adoption, an…
A blockchain faces two fundamental challenges. It must motivate users to maintain the system while preventing a minority of these users from colluding and gaining disproportionate control. Many popular public blockchains use monetary…
Blockchain, the technology behind the popular Bitcoin, is considered a "security by design" system as it is meant to create security among a group of distrustful parties yet without a central trusted authority. The security of blockchain…
Blockchain-based federated learning (BCFL) has recently gained tremendous attention because of its advantages such as decentralization and privacy protection of raw data. However, there has been few research focusing on the allocation of…
The main goal of this article is to present a direct approach for the formula giving the long-term apparent hashrates of Selfish Mining strategies using only elementary probabilities and combinatorics, more precisely, Dyck words. We can…
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…
We study selfish mining attacks in longest-chain blockchains like Bitcoin, but where the proof of work is replaced with efficient proof systems -- like proofs of stake or proofs of space -- and consider the problem of computing an optimal…
We propose a mean field game model to study the question of how centralization of reward and computational power occur in Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies. Miners compete against each other for mining rewards by increasing their computational…
We study the computation contests where players compete for searching a solution to a given problem with a winner-take-all reward. The search processes are independent across the players and the search speeds of players are proportional to…
Reward hacking--where agents exploit flaws in imperfect reward functions rather than performing tasks as intended--poses risks for AI alignment. Reward hacking has been observed in real training runs, with coding agents learning to…