Related papers: Bandwidth-Efficient Transaction Relay for Bitcoin
Despite being under development for over 15 years, transaction throughput remains one of the key challenges confronting blockchains, which typically has a cap of a limited number of transactions per second. A fundamental factor limiting…
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
The Bitcoin Lightning network is a mechanism to enable fast and inexpensive off-chain Bitcoin transactions using peer-to-peer (P2P) channels between nodes that can also be composed into a routing path. Although the resulting possible…
Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this…
The rise of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin, which enable transactions with a degree of pseudonymity, has led to a surge in various illicit activities, including ransomware payments and transactions on darknet markets. These illegal…
We analyze how secure a block is after the block becomes $k$-deep, i.e., security-latency, for Nakamoto consensus under an exponential network delay model. We provide the fault tolerance and extensive bounds on safety violation…
With the advent of blockchain technology, the number of proposals has boomed. The network traffic imposed by these blockchain proposals increases the cost of hosting nodes. Unfortunately, as of today, we are not aware of any comparative…
Efficient and reliable block propagation on the Bitcoin network is vital for ensuring the scalability of this peer-to-peer network. To this end, several schemes have been proposed over the last few years to speed up the block propagation,…
Bitcoin is a popular alternative to fiat money, widely used for its perceived anonymity properties. However, recent attacks on Bitcoin's peer-to-peer (P2P) network demonstrated that its gossip-based flooding protocols, which are used to…
We present Fission, a new permissionless blockchain that achieves scalability in both terms of system throughput and transaction confirmation time, while at the same time, retaining blockchain's core values of equality and decentralization.…
Bitcoin is a popular digital currency for online payments, realized as a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Bitcoin keeps a ledger of all transactions; the majority of the participants decides on the correct ledger. Since…
Bitcoin's design promises resilience through decentralization, yet the physical infrastructure supporting the network creates hidden dependencies. We present the first longitudinal study of Bitcoin's resilience to submarine cable failures,…
In this paper, we consider a bidirectional relay network with half-duplex nodes and block fading where the nodes transmit with a fixed transmission rate. Thereby, user 1 and user 2 exchange information only via a relay node, i.e., a direct…
The emerging blockchain protocols provide a decentralized architecture that is suitable of supporting Internet of Things (IoT) interactions. However, keeping a local copy of the blockchain ledger is infeasible for low-power and…
This paper surveys innovative protocols that enhance the programming functionality of the Bitcoin blockchain, a key part of the "Bitcoin Ecosystem." Bitcoin utilizes the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model and a stack-based script…
Lightning Network (LN) is a widely-used network of payment channels enabling faster and cheaper Bitcoin transactions. In this paper, we outline three ways an attacker can steal funds from honest LN users. The attacks require dilating the…
Bitcoin provides freshness properties by forming a blockchain where each block is associated with its timestamp and the previous block. Due to these properties, the Bitcoin protocol is being used as a decentralized, trusted, and secure…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
Relay nodes-enhanced architectures are deemed a viable solution to enhance coverage and capacity of nowadays cellular networks. Besides a number of desirable features, these architectures reduce the average distance between users and…
Off-chain transaction networks can mitigate the scalability issues of today's trustless electronic cash systems such as Bitcoin. However, these peer-to-peer networks also introduce a new attack surface which is not well-understood today.…