Related papers: Blockchain Mining Games with Pay Forward
Understanding the strategic behavior of miners in a blockchain is of great importance for its proper operation. A common model for mining games considers an infinite time horizon, with players optimizing asymptotic average objectives.…
The idea of security sharing goes back to Nakamoto's introduction of merge mining, a technique that enables Bitcoin miners to reuse their hash power to bootstrap and secure other Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. However, with the rise of…
A blockchain faces two fundamental challenges. It must motivate users to maintain the system while preventing a minority of these users from colluding and gaining disproportionate control. Many popular public blockchains use monetary…
Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…
The Bitcoin payment system involves two agent types: Users that transact with the currency and pay fees and miners in charge of authorizing transactions and securing the system in return for these fees. Two of Bitcoin's challenges are (i)…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, are increasingly adopting layer-2 scaling solutions to improve transaction throughput and reduce fees. One popular layer-2 approach is the Optimistic Rollup, which relies on a mechanism known as a…
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…
In the Bitcoin system, miners are incentivized to join the system and validate transactions through fees paid by the users. A simple "pay your bid" auction has been employed to determine the transaction fees. Recently, Lavi, Sattath and…
Due to its minimal energy requirement the PoS consensus protocol has become an attractive alternative to PoW in modern cryptocurrencies. In this protocol the chance of being selected as a block proposer in each round is proportional to the…
On several proof-of-stake blockchains, agents engaged in validating transactions can open a pool to which others can delegate their stake in order to earn higher returns. We develop a model of staking pool formation in the presence of…
Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency, and an accompanying protocol, created in 2008. Bitcoin nodes continuously generate and propagate blocks---collections of newly approved transactions that are added to Bitcoin's ledger. Block…
In blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, users compete in a transaction fee auction to get their transactions confirmed in the next block. A line of recent works set forth the desiderata for a "dream" transaction fee mechanism (TFM),…
We present an analysis of the Proof-of-Work consensus algorithm, used on the Bitcoin blockchain, using a Mean Field Game framework. Using a master equation, we provide an equilibrium characterization of the total computational power devoted…
We propose a model suggesting that honest-but-rational consensus participants may play timing games, and strategically delay their block proposal to optimize MEV capture, while still ensuring the proposal's timely inclusion in the canonical…
The fundamental building blocks of the Bitcoin lightning network are bidirectional payment channels. We describe an extension of payment channels in the Proofgold network which allow the two parties to bet on whether a proposition will be…
Transaction fee mechanism design is a new decentralized mechanism design problem where users bid for space on the blockchain. Several recent works showed that the transaction fee mechanism design fundamentally departs from classical…
One of the most innovative aspects of blockchain technology consists in the introduction of an incentive layer to regulate the behavior of distributed protocols. The designer of a blockchain system faces therefore issues that are akin to…
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…
A blockchain is a database of sequential events that is maintained by a distributed group of nodes. A key consensus problem in blockchains is that of determining the next block (data element) in the sequence. Many blockchains address this…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…