Related papers: Diversification Across Mining Pools: Optimal Minin…
Cybercriminals have been exploiting cryptocurrencies to commit various unique financial frauds. Covert cryptomining - which is defined as an unauthorized harnessing of victims' computational resources to mine cryptocurrencies - is one of…
The selfish mining attack, arguably the most famous game-theoretic attack in blockchain, indicates that the Bitcoin protocol is not incentive-compatible. Most subsequent works mainly focus on strengthening the selfish mining strategy, thus…
We study the strategic considerations of miners participating in the bitcoin's protocol. We formulate and study the stochastic game that underlies these strategic considerations. The miners collectively build a tree of blocks, and they are…
One decade ago, Bitcoin was introduced, becoming the first cryptocurrency and establishing the concept of "blockchain" as a distributed ledger. As of today, there are many different implementations of cryptocurrencies working over a…
Blockchain technology, while revolutionary in enabling decentralized transactions, faces scalability challenges as the ledger must be replicated across all nodes of the chain, limiting throughput and efficiency. Sharding, which divides the…
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…
We propose a bitcoin generalization as a solution to the problem of scalability. The block is redefined as a sequence of sub-blocks of increasing sizes that coexist as different levels of compromise between decentralization and transactions…
We study the strategic implications that arise from adding one extra option to the miners participating in the bitcoin protocol. We propose that when adding a block, miners also have the ability to pay forward an amount to be collected by…
In this paper, we provide a novel dynamic decision method of blockchain selfish mining by applying the sensitivity-based optimization theory. Our aim is to find the optimal dynamic blockchain-pegged policy of the dishonest mining pool. To…
It is interesting but difficult and challenging to study Ethereum with multiple mining pools. One of the main difficulties comes from not only how to represent such a general tree with multiple block branches (or sub-chains) related to the…
PAI Coin's Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism utilizes the double SHA-256 hashing protocol-- the same mechanism used by Bitcoin Core. This compatibility with classic Bitcoin-style mining provides low barrier to entry for PAI Coin…
Bitcoin is a decentralized P2P digital currency in which coins are generated by a distributed set of miners and transaction are broadcasted via a peer-to-peer network. While Bitcoin provides some level of anonymity (or rather pseudonymity)…
Resource-based consensus is the backbone of permissionless distributed ledger systems. The security of such protocols relies fundamentally on the level of resources actively engaged in the system. The variety of different resources (and…
Despite being described as a medium of exchange, cryptocurrencies do not have the typical attributes of a medium of exchange. Consequently, cryptocurrencies are more appropriately described as crypto assets. A common investment attribute…
Most concurrent blockchain systems rely heavily on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms for decentralized consensus and security assurance. However, the substantial energy expenditure stemming from computationally…
Bitcoin and many other similar Cryptocurrencies have been in existence for over a decade, prominently focusing on decentralized, pseudo-anonymous ledger-based transactions. Many protocol improvements and changes have resulted in new…
Blockchains rely on a consensus among participants to achieve decentralization and security. However, reaching consensus in an online, digital world where identities are not tied to physical users is a challenging problem. Proof-of-work…
Stratum, the de-facto mining communication protocol used by blockchain based cryptocurrency systems, enables miners to reliably and efficiently fetch jobs from mining pool servers. In this paper we exploit Stratum's lack of encryption to…
Proof of work (PoW), as the representative consensus protocol for blockchain, consumes enormous amounts of computation and energy to determine bookkeeping rights among miners but does not achieve any practical purposes. To address the…
A proof of work (PoW) is an important cryptographic construct enabling a party to convince others that they invested some effort in solving a computational task. Arguably, its main impact has been in the setting of cryptocurrencies such as…