Related papers: Using Economic Risk to Model Miner Hash Rate Alloc…
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…
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…
We make several contributions that quantify the real-time hash rate and therefore the consensus of a blockchain. We show that by using only the hash value of blocks, we can estimate and measure the hash rate of all miners or individual…
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain PoW consensus on how the existence of multiple misbehaving miners influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner (or attacker interchangeably)…
We argue that the current POW based consensus algorithm of the Bitcoin network suffers from a fundamental economic discrepancy between the real world transaction (txn) costs incurred by miners and the wealth that is being transacted. Put…
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…
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…
Envisioned to be the future of secured distributed systems, blockchain networks have received increasing attention from both the industry and academia in recent years. However, blockchain mining processes demand high hardware costs and…
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…
Blockchain is a technology that provides a distributed ledger that stores previous records while maintaining consistency and security. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized electronic cryptographic system that uses blockchain…
Mining blocks in a blockchain using the \textit{Proof-of-Work} consensus protocol involves significant risk, as network participants face continuous operational costs while earning infrequent capital gains upon successfully mining a block.…
Several emerging PoW blockchain protocols rely on a "parallel-chain" architecture for scaling, where instead of a single chain, multiple chains are run in parallel and aggregated. A key requirement of practical PoW blockchains is to adapt…
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…
The mining of bitcoin is modeled using system dynamics, showing that the past evolution of the network hash rate can be explained to a large extent by an efficient market hypothesis applied to the mining of blocks. The possibility of a…
A proof of work (PoW) blockchain protocol distributes rewards to its participants, called miners, according to their share of the total computational power. Sufficiently large miners can perform selfish mining - deviate from the protocol to…
Although Bitcoin was intended to be a decentralized digital currency, in practice, mining power is quite concentrated. This fact is a persistent source of concern for the Bitcoin community. We provide an explanation using a simple model to…
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…
Bitcoin's (BTC) Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) has been a source of vulnerability for incentive attacks such as selfish mining, block withholding and coin hopping strategies. In this paper, first, we rigorously study the short-term…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography which has recently gained excessive popularity. Scientific research on bitcoin is less abundant. A paper at Financial Cryptography 2012…
Blockchain systems are designed to produce blocks at a constant average rate. The most popular systems currently employ a Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm as a means of creating these blocks. Bitcoin produces, on average, one block every 10…