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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…
Cooperation is fundamental for human prosperity. Blockchain, as a trust machine, is a cooperative institution in cyberspace that supports cooperation through distributed trust with consensus protocols. While studies in computer science…
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…
We model and analyze blockchain miners who seek to maximize the compound return of their mining businesses. The analysis of the optimal strategies finds a new equilibrium point among the miners and the mining pools, which predicts the…
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…
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…
We study a game-theoretic model of blockchain mining economies and show that griefing, a practice according to which participants harm other participants at some lesser cost to themselves, is a prevalent threat at its Nash equilibria. The…
It is interesting but difficult and challenging to study Ethereum with multiple mining pools. One of the main difficulties comes from not only how to represent such a general tree with multiple block branches (or sub-chains) related to the…
Forks in the Bitcoin network result from the natural competition in the blockchain's Proof-of-Work consensus protocol. Their frequency is a critical indicator for the efficiency of a distributed ledger as they can contribute to resource…
This paper studies proof-of-work Nakamoto consensus protocols under bounded network delays, settling two long-standing questions in blockchain security: What is the most effective attack on block safety under a given block confirmation…
We study game-theoretic models for capturing participation in blockchain systems. Permissionless blockchains can be naturally viewed as games, where a set of potentially interested users is faced with the dilemma of whether to engage with…
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…
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
In cryptocurrencies, the block reward is meant to serve as the incentive mechanism for miners to commit resources to create blocks and in effect secure the system. Existing systems primarily divide the reward in proportion to expended…
Mining for Bitcoins is a high-risk high-reward activity. Miners, seeking to reduce their variance and earn steadier rewards, collaborate in pooling strategies where they jointly mine for Bitcoins. Whenever some pool participant is…
Since the inception of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have attracted an increasing interest from both academia and industry. Among various core components, consensus protocol is the defining technology…
Nakamoto consensus underlies the security of many of the world's largest cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Common lore is that Nakamoto consensus only achieves consistency and liveness under a regime where the difficulty 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…
The resource-consuming mining of blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol bears the risk of ruin, namely when the operational costs for the mining exceed the received rewards. In this paper we investigate to…
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain on how the existence of multiple misbehaving pools influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner maintains a private chain and makes it…