Related papers: Model Checking Bitcoin and other Proof-of-Work Con…
Blockchains rely on a consensus among participants to achieve decentralization and security. However, reaching consensus in an online, digital world where identities are not tied to physical users is a challenging problem. Proof-of-work…
Authorization is challenging in distributed systems that cannot rely on the identification of nodes. Proof-of-work offers an alternative gate-keeping mechanism, but its probabilistic nature is incompatible with conventional security…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain…
Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, while central to achieving decentralized consensus, has long been criticized for excessive energy use and hardware inefficiencies \cite{devries2018bitcoin, truby2018decarbonizing}. This paper…
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…
Consensus protocols are crucial for a blockchain system as they are what allow agreement between the system's nodes in a potentially adversarial environment. For this reason, it is paramount to ensure their correct design and implementation…
The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its…
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that incentivizes…
Does the proof-of-work protocol serve its intended purpose of supporting decentralized cryptocurrency mining? To address this question, we develop a game-theoretical model where miners first invest in hardware to improve the efficiency of…
In the paper, we present designs for multiple blockchain consensus primitives and a novel blockchain system, all based on the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX-enabled CPUs. First, we show how using TEEs for…
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…
Proof of work blockchain protocols using multiple hash types are considered. It is proven that the security region of such a protocol cannot be the AND of a 51\% attack on all the hash types. Nevertheless, a protocol called Merged Bitcoin…
A proof of the security of the Bitcoin protocol is made rigorous, and simplified in certain parts. A computational model in which an adversary can delay transmission of blocks by time $\Delta$ is considered. The protocol is generalized to…
Regardless of their variations, blockchains require a consensus mechanism to validate transactions, supervise added blocks, maintain network security, synchronize the network state, and distribute incentives. Proof-of-Work (PoW), one of the…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment system proposed by Nakamoto in 2008. Properties of the bitcoin backbone protocol have been investigated in some depth: the blockchain growth property quantifies the number of blocks added to the blockchain…
Payment channel networks are an approach to improve the scalability of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. The Lightning Network is a payment channel network built for Bitcoin that is already used in practice. Because the Lightning Network…
We propose a refinement to the well known, and widely used, proof-of-work scheme of zeroing a cryptographic hash. Our refinement allows multiple autonomous users to cooperate on the proof-of-work for their own transactions in order to bring…
This paper investigates the fundamental trade-offs between block safety, confirmation latency, and transaction throughput of proof-of-work (PoW) longest-chain fork-choice protocols, also known as PoW Nakamoto consensus. New upper and lower…
The Decentralized-Consistent-Scale (DCS) Triangle defines three dimensions that illustrate the tradeoffs of the blockchain consensus mechanism. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid consensus protocol, called Deterministic Proof of Work…