Related papers: A Deep Dive into Blockchain Selfish Mining
Miners play a key role in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin: they invest substantial computational resources in processing transactions and minting new currency units. It is well known that an attacker controlling more than half of the…
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…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology and proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism where nodes spend computing resources and earn rewards in return for spending these resources. This incentive system has caused power to be significantly biased towards a…
The energy sustainability of blockchains, whose consensus protocol rests on the Proof-of-Work, nourishes a heated debate. The underlying issue lies in a highly energy-consuming process, defined as mining, required to validate crypto-asset…
Incentive mechanisms are central to the functionality of permissionless blockchains: they incentivize participants to run and secure the underlying consensus protocol. Designing incentive-compatible incentive mechanisms is notoriously…
A blockchain, such as Bitcoin, is an append-only, secure, transparent, distributed ledger. A fair blockchain is expected to have healthy metrics; high honest mining power, low processing latency, i.e., low wait times for transactions and…
The emergence of more and more blockchain solutions with innovative approaches to optimising performance, scalability, privacy and governance complicates performance analysis. Reasons for the difficulty of benchmarking blockchains include,…
Decentralization, which has backed the hyper growth of many blockchains, comes at the cost of scalability. To understand this fundamental limitation, this paper proposes a quantitative measure of blockchain decentralization, and discusses…
Increasing popularity of trading digital assets can lead to significant delays in Blockchain networks when processing transactions. When transaction fees become miners' primary revenue, an imbalance in reward may lead to miners adopting…
This paper develops a model to evaluate the viability of blockchain markets as the sole venue for price formation. Blockchains clear at discrete intervals called block time, and transactions are executed sequentially according to priority…
Blockchain has many benefits including decentralization, availability, persistency, consistency, anonymity, auditability and accountability, and it also covers a wide spectrum of applications ranging from cryptocurrency, financial services,…
In a PoW-based blockchain network, mining pools (the solo miner could be regarded as a mining pool containing one miner) compete to successfully mine blocks to pursue rewards. Generally, the rewards include the fixed block subsidies and…
Selfish mining is strategic rule-breaking to maximize rewards in proof-of-work protocols. Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the preferred tool for finding optimal strategies in Bitcoin and similar linear chain protocols. Protocols…
In this paper, we systematically explore the attack surface of the Blockchain technology, with an emphasis on public Blockchains. Towards this goal, we attribute attack viability in the attack surface to 1) the Blockchain cryptographic…
The security of blockchain systems is fundamentally based on the decentralized consensus in which the majority of parties behave honestly, and the content verification process is essential to maintaining the robustness of blockchain…
As distributed ledgers, blockchains run consensus protocols which trade capacity for consistency, especially in non-ideal networks with incomplete connectivity and erroneous links. Existing studies on the tradeoff between capacity and…
Transactions submitted through the blockchain peer-to-peer (P2P) network may leak out exploitable information. We study the economic incentives behind the adoption of blockchain dark venues, where users' transactions are observable only by…
In 2015, Eyal proposed the first game-theoretical model for analyzing the equilibrium of blockchain pooling: when the blockchain pools are abstracted as a non-cooperative game, two pools can reach a Nash equilibrium with a closed-form…
Natural forking in blockchain refers to a phenomenon that there are a set of blocks at one block height at the same time, implying that various nodes have different perspectives of the main chain. Natural forking might give rise to multiple…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…