Related papers: A Deep Dive into Blockchain Selfish Mining
The blockchain paradigm provides a mechanism for content dissemination and distributed consensus on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. While this paradigm has been widely adopted in industry, it has not been carefully analyzed in terms of its…
We study efficiency in a proof-of-work blockchain with non-zero latencies, focusing in particular on the (inequality in) individual miners' efficiencies. Prior work attributed differences in miners' efficiencies mostly to attacks, but we…
An increasing amount of users' sensitive information is now being collected for analytics purposes. To protect users' privacy, differential privacy has been widely studied in the literature. Specifically, a differentially private algorithm…
Bitcoin-NG, a scalable blockchain protocol, divides each block into a key block and many micro blocks to effectively improve the transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG has a special incentive mechanism (i.e. splitting transaction fees…
For a mining strategy we define the notion of "profit lag" as the minimum time it takes to be profitable after that moment. We compute closed forms for the profit lag and the revenue ratio for the strategies "selfish mining" and…
The consensus protocol named proof of work (PoW) is widely applied by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Although security of a PoW cryptocurrency is always the top priority, it is threatened by mining attacks like selfish mining. Researchers…
Formal analyses of blockchain protocols have received much attention recently. Consistency results of Nakamoto's blockchain protocol are often expressed in a quantity $c$, which denotes the expected number of network delays before some…
One of the fundamental applications for a practically useful system of money is remuneration. Information pertaining to the amount of compensation awarded to different individuals is often considered sensitive, commanding a certain degree…
Bitcoin was recently introduced as a peer-to-peer electronic currency in order to facilitate transactions outside the traditional financial system. The core of Bitcoin, the Blockchain, is the history of the transactions in the system…
Mining is a central operation of all proof-of-work (PoW) based cryptocurrencies. The vast majority of miners today participate in "mining pools" instead of "solo mining" in order to lower risk and achieve a more steady income. However, this…
Decentralization has been touted as the principal security advantage which propelled blockchain systems at the forefront of developments in the financial technology space. Its exact semantics nevertheless remain highly contested and…
In blockchain systems, the scarcity of a resource is used as a Sybil protection mechanism. In Proof-of-Work blockchains, that resource is computing power. In the event of a fork, the scarcity of this resource theoretically prevents miners…
Monero is a privacy-centric cryptocurrency that allows users to obscure their transactions by including chaff coins, called "mixins," along with the actual coins they spend. In this paper, we empirically evaluate two weaknesses in Monero's…
It is an important decision-making problem for a miner in the blockchain networks if he/she participates in the mining so that he/she earns a reward by creating a new block earlier than other miners. We formulate this decision-making…
Proof-of-work blockchains reward each miner for one completed block by an amount that is, in expectation, proportional to the number of hashes the miner contributed to the mining of the block. Is this proportional allocation rule optimal?…
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…
Blockchain and blockchain-based decentralized applications are attracting increasing attentions recently. In public blockchain systems, users usually connect to third-party peers or run a peer to join the P2P blockchain network. However,…
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…
Blockchains are widely used for secure transaction processing, but their scalability remains limited, and existing multichain designs are typically static even as demand and capacity shift. We cast blockchain configuration as a multiagent…
In this paper, we identify a new form of attack, called the Balance attack, against proof-of-work blockchain systems. The novelty of this attack consists of delaying network communications between multiple subgroups of nodes with balanced…