Related papers: The Gap Game
Banking as an essential service can be hard to access in remote, rural regions where the network connectivity is intermittent. Although micro-banking has been made possible by SMS or USSD messages in some places, their security flaws and…
Blockchain is a novel technology that is rising a lot of interest in the industrial and re- search sectors because its properties of decentralisation, immutability and data integrity. Initially, the underlying consensus mechanism has been…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…
Blockchain-based games have introduced novel economic models that blend traditional gaming with decentralized ownership and financial incentives, leading to the rapid emergence of the GameFi sector. However, despite their innovative appeal,…
Blockchains have sparked global interest in recent years, gaining importance as they increasingly influence technology and finance. This thesis investigates the robustness of blockchain protocols, specifically focusing on Ethereum…
Blockchain's economic value lies in enabling financial and economic transactions without relying on trusted, centralized intermediaries. In practice, however, transactions pass through a fragmented chain of intermediaries before being…
This paper proposes a new paradigm: generative blockchain, which aims to transform conventional blockchain technology by combining transaction generation and recording, rather than focusing solely on transaction recording. Central to our…
Payment channels were introduced to solve various eminent cryptocurrency scalability issues. Multiple payment channels build a network on top of a blockchain, the so-called layer 2. In this work, we analyze payment networks through the lens…
Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by miners to steal block rewards. In this paper, we explore a new form of selfish mining attack that guarantees high rewards with low cost. We show the feasibility of…
Peer-to-peer (p2p) networks are not independent of their peers, and the network efficiency depends on peers contributing resources. Because shared resources are not free, this contribution must be rewarded. Peers across the network may…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising solution to the scalability problem of cryptocurrencies. Any two users connected by a payment channel in the network can theoretically send an unbounded number of instant, costless…
With the development of decentralized consensus protocols, permissionless blockchains have been envisioned as a promising enabler for the general-purpose transaction-driven, autonomous systems. However, most of the prevalent blockchain…
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…
The use of blockchains for automated and adversarial trading has become commonplace. However, due to the transparent nature of blockchains, an adversary is able to observe any pending, not-yet-mined transactions, along with their execution…
Machine learning has recently enabled large advances in artificial intelligence, but these tend to be highly centralized. The large datasets required are generally proprietary; predictions are often sold on a per-query basis; and published…
Most public blockchain protocols, including the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, do not formally specify the order in which miners should select transactions from the pool of pending (or uncommitted) transactions for inclusion in…
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain networks have attracted tremendous attention from their volatile price movements and the promise of decentralization. However, most projects run on business narratives with no way to test and verify their…
While many distributed consensus protocols provide robust liveness and consistency guarantees under the presence of malicious actors, quantitative estimates of how economic incentives affect security are few and far between. In this paper,…
We investigate how a blockchain can distill the collective belief of its nodes regarding the trustworthiness of a (sub)set of nodes into a {\em reputation system} that reflects the probability of correctly performing a task. To address this…
A recent trend in multi-party computation is to achieve cryptographic fairness via monetary penalties, i.e. each honest player either obtains the output or receives a compensation in the form of a cryptocurrency. We pioneer another type of…