Related papers: A Difficulty in Controlling Blockchain Mining Cost…
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…
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…
Blockchains are widely used for secure transaction processing, but their scalability remains limited, and existing multichain designs are typically static even as demand and capacity shift. We cast blockchain configuration as a multiagent…
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…
Blockchains rely on economic incentives to ensure secure and decentralised operation, making incentive compatibility a core design concern. However, protocols are rarely deployed in isolation. Applications interact with the underlying…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular consensus protocol used by Bitcoin since its inception. PoW has the well-known flaw of assigning all the reward to the single miner (or pool) that inserts the new block. This has the consequence of making…
Cloud auctions provide cost-effective strategies for cloud VM allocation. Most existing cloud auctions simply assume that the auctioneer is trustable, and thus the fairness of auctions can be easily achieved. However, in fact, such a…
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…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies secure a decentralized consensus protocol by incentives. The protocol participants, called miners, generate (mine) a series of blocks, each containing monetary transactions created by system users. As…
It has been known for some time that the Nakamoto consensus as implemented in the Bitcoin protocol is not totally aligned with the individual interests of the participants. More precisely, it has been shown that block withholding mining…
Blockchains have popularized the Automated Market Makers (AMMs), where users trade crypto-assets directly with a smart contract, governed by a pricing function embedded in the contract's code. Today, users of AMMs are often forced to accept…
We study a game-theoretic model of blockchain mining economies and show that griefing, a practice according to which participants harm other participants at some lesser cost to themselves, is a prevalent threat at its Nash equilibria. The…
Cooperation is fundamental for human prosperity. Blockchain, as a trust machine, is a cooperative institution in cyberspace that supports cooperation through distributed trust with consensus protocols. While studies in computer science…
Proof-of-stake (PoS) is a promising approach for designing efficient blockchains, where block proposers are randomly chosen with probability proportional to their stake. A primary concern with PoS systems is the "rich getting richer"…
This paper develops a model to evaluate the viability of blockchain markets as the sole venue for price formation. Blockchains clear at discrete intervals called block time, and transactions are executed sequentially according to priority…
Bitcoin and other similar digital currencies on blockchains are not ideal means for payment, because their prices tend to go up in the long term (thus people are incentivized to hoard those currencies), and to fluctuate widely in the short…
We study the strategic implications that arise from adding one extra option to the miners participating in the bitcoin protocol. We propose that when adding a block, miners also have the ability to pay forward an amount to be collected by…
In traditional public blockchain networks, transaction fees are only allocated to full nodes (i.e., miners). However, the lack of relay rewards reduces the willingness of light nodes to relay transactions, especially in the…
Second-price auctions with deposits are frequently used in blockchain environments. An auction takes place on-chain: bidders deposit an amount that fully covers their bid (but possibly exceeds it) in a smart contract. The deposit is used as…
We study the following problem that is motivated by Blockchains where ``miners'' are serially given the monopoly for assembling transactions into the next block. Our model has a single good that is sold repeatedly every day where new demand…