Related papers: Bobtail: A Proof-of-Work Target that Minimizes Blo…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular consensus protocol used by Bitcoin since its inception. PoW has the well-known flaw of assigning all the reward to the single miner (or pool) that inserts the new block. This has the consequence of making…
The security of blockchain systems depends on the distribution of mining power across participants. If sufficient mining power is controlled by one entity, they can force their own version of events. This may allow them to double spend…
In the area of blockchain, numerous methods have been proposed for suppressing intentional forks by attackers more effectively than the random rule. However, all of them, except for the random rule, require major updates, rely on a trusted…
Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, while central to achieving decentralized consensus, has long been criticized for excessive energy use and hardware inefficiencies \cite{devries2018bitcoin, truby2018decarbonizing}. This paper…
Bitcoin mining is a wasteful and resource-intensive process. To add a block of transactions to the blockchain, miners spend a considerable amount of energy. The Bitcoin protocol, named 'proof of work' (PoW), resembles a lottery and the…
Bitcoin is the first fully-decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol to achieve a high level of security, but at the expense of poor throughput and latency. Scaling the performance of Bitcoin has a been a major recent direction of…
All public blockchains are secured by a proof of opportunity cost among block producers. For example, the security offered by proof-of-work (PoW) systems, like Bitcoin, is due to spent computation; it is work precisely because it cannot be…
Designing an efficient difficulty control algorithm is an essential problem in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains because the network hash rate is randomly changing. This paper proposes a general difficulty control algorithm and provides…
In Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains, the average waiting time to generate a block is inversely proportional to the computing power of the miner. To reduce the average block generation time, a group of individual miners can form a mining pool…
Abrupt changes in the miner hash rate applied to a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain can adversely affect user experience and security. Because different PoW blockchains often share hashing algorithms, miners face a complex choice in deciding…
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…
This paper opts to mitigate the energy-inefficiency of the Blockchain Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm by rationally repurposing the power spent during the mining process. The original PoW mining scheme is designed to consider one…
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…
A blockchain is a decentralized ledger where all transactions are recorded. For having a reliable blockchain and double-spending prevention, we need a decentralized consensus and agreement on a blockchain. Bitcoin uses proof-of-work (PoW).…
Proof-of-Work is a consensus algorithm where miners solve cryptographic puzzles to mine blocks and obtain a reward through some Block Reward Mechanism (BRM). PoW blockchain faces the problem of centralization due to the formation of mining…
One of the most important features of blockchain protocols is decentralization, as their main contribution is that they formulate a distributed ledger that will be maintained and extended without the need of a trusted party. Bitcoin has…
Due to the increasing interest in blockchain technology for fostering secure, auditable, decentralized applications, a set of challenges associated with this technology need to be addressed. In this letter, we focus on the delay associated…
Bitcoin constructs temporal order internally rather than synchronizing to any external clock. Empirical evidence shows that its time evolution is non-continuous, probabilistic, and self-regulated. Block discovery follows a stochastic…
A key component of security in decentralized blockchains is proof of opportunity cost among block producers. In the case of proof-of-work (PoW), currently used by the most prominent systems, the cost is due to spent computation. In this…
Bitcoin blockchain uses hash-based Proof-of-Work (PoW) that prevents unwanted participants from hogging the network resources. Anyone entering the mining game has to prove that they have expended a specific amount of computational power.…