Related papers: Hopping-Proof and Fee-Free Pooled Mining in Blockc…
Blockchain systems come with the promise of being inclusive for a variety of decentralized applications (DApps) that can serve different purposes and have different urgency requirements. Despite this, the transaction fee mechanisms…
Sharding is used to address the performance and scalability issues of the blockchain protocols, which divides the overall transaction processing costs among multiple clusters of nodes. Shards require less storage capacity and communication…
We introduce a zero-knowledge cryptocurrency mixer framework that allows groups of users to set up a mixing pool with configurable governance conditions, configurable deposit delays, and the ability to refund or confiscate deposits if it is…
We analyze the economic incentives generated by the proof-of-stake mechanism discussed in the Ethereum Casper upgrade proposal. Compared with proof-of-work, proof-of-stake has a different cost structure for attackers. In Budish (2018),…
We analyze Bitcoin mining from the perspective of a game and propose an optimal mining model that maximizes profits of pools and miners. The model is a two-stage Stackelberg game in which each stage forms a sub-game. In stage I, pools are…
Probabilistic programming and the formal analysis of probabilistic algorithms are active areas of research, driven by the widespread use of randomness to improve performance. While functional correctness has seen substantial progress,…
We present and validate a novel mathematical model of the blockchain mining process and use it to conduct an economic evaluation of the double-spend attack, which is fundamental to all blockchain systems. Our analysis focuses on the value…
Fair exchange protocols let two mutually distrustful parties exchange digital data in a way that neither party can cheat. They have various applications such as the exchange of digital items, or the exchange of digital coins and digital…
Decentralized control, low-complexity, flexible and efficient communications are the requirements of an architecture that aims to scale blockchains beyond the current state. Such properties are attainable by reducing ledger size and…
Sharding distributed ledgers is a promising on-chain solution for scaling blockchains but lacks formal grounds, nurturing skepticism on whether such complex systems can scale blockchains securely. We fill this gap by introducing the first…
Hashed Timelock Contract (HTLC) in Lightning Network is susceptible to a griefing attack. An attacker can block several channels and stall payments by mounting this attack. A state-of-the-art countermeasure, Hashed Timelock Contract with…
Sharding has emerged as a key technique to address blockchain scalability by partitioning the ledger into multiple shards that process transactions in parallel. Although this approach improves throughput, static or heuristic shard…
Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the current state. If an enhanced majority of staking nodes, also called validators, agree on a proposed block, then this block is appended to the blockchain.…
The on-demand mobility market, including ridesharing, is becoming increasingly important with e-hailing fares growing at a rate of approximately 130% per annum since 2013. By increasing utilization of existing vehicles and empty seats,…
Mobile service providers (MSPs) are particularly vulnerable to roaming frauds, especially ones that exploit the long delay in the data exchange process of the contemporary roaming management systems, causing multi-billion dollars loss each…
Proof of Work (PoW) is a Sybil-deterrence security mechanism. It introduces an external cost to a system by requiring computational effort to perform actions. However, since its inception, a central challenge was to tune this cost. Initial…
Blockchain applications that rely on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) have increasingly become energy inefficient with a staggering carbon footprint. In contrast, energy-efficient alternative consensus protocols such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS) may…
The security of most existing cryptocurrencies is based on a concept called Proof-of-Work, in which users must solve a computationally hard cryptopuzzle to authorize transactions (`one unit of computation, one vote'). This leads to enormous…
This paper presents an option pricing model that incorporates clustered jumps using a bivariate Hawkes process. The process captures both self- and cross-excitation of positive and negative jumps, enabling the model to generate return…
In this paper we describe the various scoring systems used to calculate rewards of participants in Bitcoin pooled mining, explain the problems each were designed to solve and analyze their respective advantages and disadvantages.