Related papers: Model Checking Bitcoin and other Proof-of-Work Con…
Blockchains based on the celebrated Nakamoto consensus protocol have shown promise in several applications, including cryptocurrencies. However, these blockchains have inherent scalability limits caused by the protocol's consensus…
With the increasing adoption of decentralized information systems based on a variety of permissionless blockchain networks, the choice of consensus mechanism is at the core of many controversial discussions. Ethereum's recent transition…
Blockchain technology provides an auditable and tamper-proof distributed storage infrastructure for information records. This can be leveraged to support distributed workflow management. Compared to proof-of-work consensus, popularized by…
This master thesis deals with Blockchain Technology in mobile turn based peer to peer games. First, it investigates the capabilities of Blockchain Technology to be used for gaming applications. In this regard, among others,…
As distributed ledgers, blockchains run consensus protocols which trade capacity for consistency, especially in non-ideal networks with incomplete connectivity and erroneous links. Existing studies on the tradeoff between capacity and…
We introduce Bitcoin-IPC, a software stack and protocol that scales Bitcoin towards helping it become the universal Medium of Exchange (MoE) by enabling the permissionless creation of fully programmable Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Layer-2 chains,…
The aim of this work is to enhance blockchain security by deepening the understanding of selfish mining attacks in various consensus protocols, especially the ones that have the potential to mitigate selfish mining. Previous research was…
The paper examines decentralized cryptocurrency protocols that are based on the use of internal tokens as identity tools. An analysis of security problems with popular Proof-of-stake consensus protocols is provided. A new protocol,…
We study decentralized cryptocurrency protocols in which the participants do not deplete physical scarce resources. Such protocols commonly rely on Proof of Stake, i.e., on mechanisms that extend voting power to the stakeholders of the…
How to provide information security while fulfilling ultra reliability and low-latency requirements is one of the major concerns for enabling the next generation of ultra-reliable and low-latency communications service (xURLLC), specially…
Over the past five years, the rewards associated with mining Proof-of-Work blockchains have increased substantially. As a result, miners are heavily incentivized to design and utilize Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that…
Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not…
The protocol for cryptocurrencies can be divided into three parts, namely consensus, wallet, and networking overlay. The aim of the consensus part is to bring trustless rational peer-to-peer nodes to an agreement to the current status of…
One decade ago, Bitcoin was introduced, becoming the first cryptocurrency and establishing the concept of "blockchain" as a distributed ledger. As of today, there are many different implementations of cryptocurrencies working over a…
We introduce Unity, a new consensus algorithm for public blockchain settings. Unity is an eventual consistency protocol merging the Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) into a coherent stochastic process. It encompasses hardware and…
In this work we use formal verification to prove that the Lightning Network (LN), the most prominent scaling technique for Bitcoin, always safeguards the funds of honest users. We provide a custom implementation of (a simplification of) LN,…
Mining in proof-of-work blockchains has become an expensive affair requiring specialized hardware capable of executing several megahashes per second at huge electricity costs. Miners earn a reward each time they mine a block within the…
Despite all the progress in quantum technologies over the last decade, there is still a dearth of practical applications for quantum computers with a small number of noisy qubits. The effort to show quantum supremacy has been largely…
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 surveys innovative protocols that enhance the programming functionality of the Bitcoin blockchain, a key part of the "Bitcoin Ecosystem." Bitcoin utilizes the Unspent Transaction Output (UTXO) model and a stack-based script…