Related papers: Evolutionary Game for Mining Pool Selection in Blo…
Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the current state. If an enhanced majority of staking nodes, also called validators, agree on a proposed block, then this block is appended to the blockchain.…
We analyze how secure a block is after the block becomes $k$-deep, i.e., security-latency, for Nakamoto consensus under an exponential network delay model. We provide the fault tolerance and extensive bounds on safety violation…
The security of blockchain systems based on Proof of Work relies on mining. However, mining suffers from unstable revenue, prompting many miners to form cooperative mining pools. Most existing mining pools operate in a centralized manner,…
The Bitcoin protocol prescribes certain behavior by the miners who are responsible for maintaining and extending the underlying blockchain; in particular, miners who successfully solve a puzzle, and hence can extend the chain by a block,…
Pool block withholding attack is performed among mining pools in digital cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Instead of mining honestly, pools can be incentivized to infiltrate their own miners into other pools. These infiltrators report…
We present a novel framework for analyzing blockchain consensus mechanisms by modeling blockchain growth as a Partially Observable Stochastic Game (POSG) which we reduce to a set of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs)…
Blockchain games introduce unique gameplay and incentive mechanisms by allowing players to be rewarded with in-game assets or tokens through financial activities. However, most blockchain games are not comparable to traditional games in…
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…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
Proof-of-Stake systems randomly choose, on each round, one of the participants as a consensus leader that extends the chain with the next block such that the selection probability is proportional to the owned stake. However, distributed…
Blockchain systems run consensus rules as code to agree on the state of the distributed ledger and secure the network. Changing these rules can be risky and challenging. In addition, it can often be controversial and take much effort to…
In blockchain systems, especially cryptographic currencies such as Bitcoin, the double-spending and Byzantine-general-like problem are solved by reaching consensus protocols among all nodes. The state-of-the-art protocols include…
Parallel Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocols have been suggested in the literature to improve the safety guarantees, transaction throughput and confirmation latencies of Nakamoto consensus. In this work, we first consider the existing parallel…
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…
In Proof-of-Work blockchains, difficulty algorithms serve the crucial purpose of maintaining a stable transaction throughput by dynamically adjusting the block difficulty in response to the miners' constantly changing computational power.…
Committee-based blockchains are among the most popular alternatives of proof-of-work based blockchains, such as Bitcoin. They provide strong consistency (no fork) under classical assumptions, and avoid using energy-consuming mechanisms to…
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…
The rewards a blockchain miner earns vary with time. Most of the time is spent mining without receiving any rewards, and only occasionally the miner wins a block and earns a reward. Mining pools smoothen the stochastic flow of rewards, and…
To address the risks of validator centralization, Proposer-Builder Separation (PBS) was introduced in Ethereum to divide the roles of block building and block proposing, fostering a more equitable and decentralized block production…
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…