Related papers: Competing (Semi)-Selfish Miners in Bitcoin
Incentive mechanisms are central to the functionality of permissionless blockchains: they incentivize participants to run and secure the underlying consensus protocol. Designing incentive-compatible incentive mechanisms is notoriously…
We study selfish mining attacks in longest-chain blockchains like Bitcoin, but where the proof of work is replaced with efficient proof systems -- like proofs of stake or proofs of space -- and consider the problem of computing an optimal…
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…
Stubborn mining attack greatly downgrades Bitcoin throughput and also benefits malicious miners (attackers). This paper aims to quantify the impact of block receiving delay on stubborn mining attack severity in imperfect Bitcoin networks.…
We analyze Qubic's publicly claimed selfish mining attack against Monero in 2025. By combining measurements from Monero nodes, the Qubic pool API, and Qubic-network observations, we reconstruct Qubic-attributed blocks and effective hashrate…
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…
A recent trend in multi-party computation is to achieve cryptographic fairness via monetary penalties, i.e. each honest player either obtains the output or receives a compensation in the form of a cryptocurrency. We pioneer another type of…
Proof-of-Stake consensus protocols give rise to complex modeling challenges. We analyze the recently-updated Tezos Proof-of-Stake protocol and demonstrate that, under certain conditions, rational participants are incentivized to behave…
Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have excelled at financial services. Yet, opportunistic traders extract monetary value from the mesh of decentralized finance (DeFi) smart contracts through so-called blockchain extractable value…
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
Most online lotteries today fail to ensure the verifiability of the random process and rely on a trusted third party. This issue has received little attention since the emergence of distributed protocols like Bitcoin that demonstrated the…
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)…
A soft control of the network activity through varying reward in a proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency is reported. Rewards are the necessity to incent the contributors activities (i.e., mining) in order to maintain the PoW network. Contrary…
We revisit the fundamental question of Bitcoin's security against double spending attacks. While previous work has bounded the probability that a transaction is reversed, we show that no such guarantee can be effectively given if the…
Previous work presented a theoretical model based on the implicit Bitcoin specification for how an entity might issue a protocol native cryptocurrency that mimics features of fiat currencies. Protocol native means that it is built into the…
GHOST, like the longest-chain protocol, is a chain selection protocol and its capability in resisting selfish mining attack has been validated in imperfect blockchains of Bitcoin and its variants (Bitcoin-like). This paper explores an…
Bitcoin is a digital currency designed to rely on a decentralized, trustless network of anonymous agents. Using a pseudonymous-address-linking procedure that achieves >99% sensitivity and >99% specificity, we reveal that between launch…
Despite the tremendous interest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum today, many aspects of the underlying consensus protocols are poorly understood. Therefore, the search for protocols that improve either throughput or security…
Bitcoin is the first implementation of what has become known as a 'public permissionless' blockchain. Guaranteeing security and protocol conformity through its elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoretic economic…
Clients of permissionless blockchain systems, like Bitcoin, rely on an underlying peer-to-peer network to send and receive transactions. It is critical that a client is connected to at least one honest peer, as otherwise the client can be…