Related papers: How to profit from payments channels
Mining for Bitcoins is a high-risk high-reward activity. Miners, seeking to reduce their variance and earn steadier rewards, collaborate in pooling strategies where they jointly mine for Bitcoins. Whenever some pool participant is…
This work applies reinforcement learning (RL) from the AI machine learning field to derive an optimal Bitcoin-like blockchain mining strategy without knowing the details of the blockchain network model. Previously, the most profitable…
How can a system designer exploit system-level knowledge to derive incentives to optimally influence social behavior? The literature on network routing contains many results studying the application of monetary tolls to influence behavior…
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…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…
We consider the problem of maximizing the revenue raised from tolls set on the arcs of a transportation network, under the constraint that users are assigned to toll-compatible shortest paths. We first prove that this problem is strongly…
Recent estimates put the carbon footprint of Bitcoin and Ethereum at an average of 64 and 26 million tonnes of CO2 per year, respectively. To address this growing problem, several possible approaches have been proposed in the literature:…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
While many researchers adopt a sharding approach to design scaling blockchains, few works have studied the transaction placement problem incurred by sharding protocols. The widely-used hashing placement algorithm renders an overwhelming…
Transactions submitted through the blockchain peer-to-peer (P2P) network may leak out exploitable information. We study the economic incentives behind the adoption of blockchain dark venues, where users' transactions are observable only by…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) are a promising solution to address blockchain scalability and throughput challenges, However, the security of PCNs and their vulnerability to attacks are not sufficiently studied. In this paper, we introduce…
A key challenge for Bitcoin cryptocurrency holders, such as startups using ICOs to raise funding, is managing their FX risk. Specifically, a misinformed decision to convert Bitcoin to fiat currency could, by itself, cost USD millions. In…
Many of the recent works on the profitability of rogue mining strategies hinge on a parameter called $\gamma$ that measures the proportion of the honest network attracted by the attacker to mine on top of his fork. These works, see…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) have been designed and utilized to address the scalability challenge and throughput limitation of blockchains. Routing is a core problem of PCNs. An ideal PCN routing method needs to achieve 1) high…
In this brief, we conduct a complex-network analysis of the Bitcoin transaction network. In particular, we design a new sampling method, namely random walk with flying-back (RWFB), to conduct effective data sampling. We then conduct a…
In cryptocurrencies, transaction fees are typically exclusively paid in the native platform currency. This restriction causes a wide range of challenges, such as deteriorated user experience, mandatory rent payments by decentralized…
Bitcoin-NG, a scalable blockchain protocol, divides each block into a key block and many micro blocks to effectively improve the transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG has a special incentive mechanism (i.e. splitting transaction fees…
We study the probabilistic distribution of the confirmation time of Bitcoin transactions, conditional on the current memory pool (i.e., the queue of transactions awaiting confirmation). The results of this paper are particularly interesting…
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),…
This paper presents a comprehensive framework for transaction posting and pricing in Layer 2 (L2) blockchain systems, focusing on challenges stemming from fluctuating Layer 1 (L1) gas fees and the congestion issues within L2 networks.…