Related papers: Mind the Mining
We analyze Bitcoin mining from the perspective of a game and propose an optimal mining model that maximizes profits of pools and miners. The model is a two-stage Stackelberg game in which each stage forms a sub-game. In stage I, pools are…
Smart Contracts and transactions allow users to implement elaborate constructions on cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Many of these constructions, including operational payment channels and atomic swaps, use a building…
Researchers have discovered a series of theoretical attacks against Bitcoin's Nakamoto consensus; the most damaging ones are selfish mining, double-spending, and consistency delay attacks. These attacks have one common cause: block…
In this work, we reexamine the vulnerability of Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) to bribing attacks, where an adversary incentivizes blockchain miners to deliberately ignore a specific transaction to undermine the punishment mechanism of…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) is designed to improve the scalability of blockchain systems by using off-chain payment paths to settle transactions in a faster, cheaper, and more private manner. This work aims to empirically study LN's…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely adopted incentive model in current blockchain systems, which unfortunately is energy inefficient. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is then proposed to tackle the energy issue. The rich-get-richer concern of PoS…
Cryptomining poses significant security risks, yet traditional detection methods like blacklists and Deep Packet Inspection (DPI) are often ineffective against encrypted mining traffic and suffer from high false positive rates. In this…
Cryptographic Self-Selection is a subroutine used to select a leader for modern proof-of-stake consensus protocols, such as Algorand. In cryptographic self-selection, each round $r$ has a seed $Q_r$. In round $r$, each account owner is…
Smart contracts are cryptographic protocols that are enforced without a judiciary. Smart contracts are used occasionally in Bitcoin and are prevalent in Ethereum. Public quantum money improves upon cash we use today, yet the current…
Smart grid is the modern two way mechanism combining the power grid, control center, smart metering facility, energy routing and customer demand response services. The system being complicated, security vulnerabilities are paramount for the…
Many blockchain systems today, including Bitcoin, rely on Proof of Work (PoW). Proof of work is crucial to the liveness and security of cryptocurrencies. The assumption when using PoW is that a lot of trial and error is required on average…
The world-changing blockchain technique provides a novel method to establish a secure, trusted and decentralized system for solving the security and personal privacy problems in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. The mining…
Modern cryptocurrency systems, such as Ethereum, permit complex financial transactions through scripts called smart contracts. These smart contracts are executed many, many times, always without real concurrency. First, all smart contracts…
Ethereum smart contracts are highly powerful, immutable, and able to retain massive amounts of tokens. However, smart contracts keep attracting attackers to benefit from smart contract flaws and Ethereum unexpected behavior. Thus,…
Bitcoin already faces a quantum threat through Shor attacks on elliptic-curve signatures. This paper isolates the other component that public discussion often conflates with it: mining. Grover's algorithm halves the exponent of brute-force…
Modern smart grids offer several types of digital control and monitoring of electric power transmission and distribution that enable greater efficiency and integrative functionality than traditional power grids. These benefits, however,…
Bitcoin mining is a wasteful and resource-intensive process. To add a block of transactions to the blockchain, miners spend a considerable amount of energy. The Bitcoin protocol, named 'proof of work' (PoW), resembles a lottery and the…
Cryptocurrencies typically aim at preserving the privacy of their users. Different cryptocurrencies preserve privacy at various levels, some of them requiring users to rely on strategies to raise the privacy level to their needs. Among…
Bitcoin and other similar digital currencies on blockchains are not ideal means for payment, because their prices tend to go up in the long term (thus people are incentivized to hoard those currencies), and to fluctuate widely in the short…
We propose a smart contract that allows two mutually distrusting parties to transact any non-digital good or service by deploying a smart contract on a blockchain to act as escrow. The contract settles disputes by letting parties wager that…