Related papers: Bitcoin: A Natural Oligopoly
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…
The core of many cryptocurrencies is the decentralised validation network operating on proof-of-work technology. In these systems, validation is done by so-called miners who can digitally sign blocks once they solve a computationally-hard…
This paper is concerned with the stability of shares in a cryptocurrency where the new coins are issued according to the Proof of Stake protocol. We identify large, medium and small investors under various rewarding schemes, and show that…
The arisen of Bitcoin has led to much enthusiasm for blockchain research and block mining, and the extensive existence of mining pools helps its participants (i.e., miners) gain reward more frequently. Recently, the mining pools are proved…
The problem of investing into a cryptocurrency market requires good understanding of the processes that regulate the price of the currency. In this paper we offer a view of a cryptocurrency market as an environment for realization of a…
Blockchains have recently gained popularity thanks to their ability to record "digital truth". They are designed to keep persistence, security, and avoid attacks which is useful for many applications. However, they are still problematic in…
As an emerging decentralized secure data management platform, blockchain has gained much popularity recently. To maintain a canonical state of blockchain data record, proof-of-work based consensus protocols provide the nodes, referred to as…
Traditional blockchain design gives miners or validators full control over transaction ordering, i.e., they can freely choose which transactions to include or exclude, as well as in which order. While not an issue initially, the emergence…
We study the fundamental differences that separate: Litecoin; Bitcoin Gold; Bitcoin Cash; Ethereum; and Zcash from Bitcoin, and draw analysis to how these features are appreciated by the market, to ultimately make an inference as to how…
Bitcoins and Blockchain technologies are attracting the attention of different scientific communities. In addition, their widespread industrial applications and the continuous introduction of cryptocurrencies are also stimulating the…
Bitcoin demonstrated the possibility of a financial ledger that operates without the need for a trusted central authority. However, concerns persist regarding its security and considerable energy consumption. We assess the consensus…
Many of the recent works on the profitability of rogue mining strategies hinge on a parameter called $\gamma$ that measures the proportion of the honest network attracted by the attacker to mine on top of his fork. These works, see…
In most popular public accessible cryptocurrency systems, the mining pool plays a key role because mining cryptocurrency with the mining pool turns the non-profitable situation into profitable for individual miners. In many recent novel…
The goal of this paper is to rigorously interrogate conventional wisdom about centralization in block-building (due to, e.g., MEV and private order flow) and the outsourcing of block-building by validators to specialists (i.e.,…
Bitcoin derives a verifiable temporal order from probabilistic block discovery and cumulative proof-of-work rather than from a trusted global clock. We show that block arrivals exhibit stable exponential behavior across difficulty epochs,…
In this paper we describe the various scoring systems used to calculate rewards of participants in Bitcoin pooled mining, explain the problems each were designed to solve and analyze their respective advantages and disadvantages.
Our aim is to determine conditions for quantum computing technology to give rise to security risks associated with quantum Bitcoin mining. Specifically, we determine the speed and energy efficiency a quantum computer needs to offer an…
Renewable resources are starting to constitute a growing portion of the total generation mix of the power system. A key difference between renewables and traditional generators is that many renewable resources are managed by individuals,…
Heretofore the concept of "blockchain" has not been precisely defined. Accordingly the potential useful applications of this technology have been largely inflated. This work sidesteps the question of what constitutes a blockchain as such…
Many large decentralized systems rely on information propagation to ensure their proper function. We examine a common scenario in which only participants that are aware of the information can compete for some reward, and thus informed…