Related papers: Towards Overcoming the Undercutting Problem
We study the incentives behind double-spend attacks on Nakamoto-style Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies. In these systems, miners are allowed to choose which transactions to reference with their block, and a common strategy for selecting…
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…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies prioritize transactions based on their fees, creating a unique kind of fee market. Empirically, this market has failed to yield stable equilibria with predictable prices for desired levels of service. We…
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…
Bitcoin mining presents a significant economic incentive for efficient hashing and broadcast of data, both parameters stemming from the Proofs of Work used to advance the network. This incentive has led to the development of Bitcoin…
Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed block…
A blockchain, such as Bitcoin, is an append-only, secure, transparent, distributed ledger. A fair blockchain is expected to have healthy metrics; high honest mining power, low processing latency, i.e., low wait times for transactions and…
Transaction fee mechanism design is a new decentralized mechanism design problem where users bid for space on the blockchain. Several recent works showed that the transaction fee mechanism design fundamentally departs from classical…
Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency, and an accompanying protocol, created in 2008. Bitcoin nodes continuously generate and propagate blocks---collections of newly approved transactions that are added to Bitcoin's ledger. Block…
Although Bitcoin was intended to be a decentralized digital currency, in practice, mining power is quite concentrated. This fact is a persistent source of concern for the Bitcoin community. We provide an explanation using a simple model to…
Selfish miners selectively withhold blocks to earn disproportionately high revenue. The vast majority of the selfish mining literature focuses exclusively on block rewards. Carlsten et al. [2016] is a notable exception, observing that…
In this paper, we review the undercutting attacks in the transaction-fee-based regime of proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains with the longest chain fork-choice rule. Next, we focus on the problem of fluctuations in mining revenue and the mining…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…
Most public blockchain protocols, including the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, do not formally specify the order in which miners should select transactions from the pool of pending (or uncommitted) transactions for inclusion in…
Blockchain systems often employ proof-of-work consensus protocols to validate and add transactions into hashchains. These protocols stimulate competition among miners in solving cryptopuzzles (e.g. SHA-256 hash computation in Bitcoin) in…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom…
Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by miners to steal block rewards. In this paper, we explore a new form of selfish mining attack that guarantees high rewards with low cost. We show the feasibility of…
The Bitcoin payment system involves two agent types: Users that transact with the currency and pay fees and miners in charge of authorizing transactions and securing the system in return for these fees. Two of Bitcoin's challenges are (i)…
Seminal work of Eyal and Sirer (2014) establishes that a strategic Bitcoin miner may strictly profit by deviating from the intended Bitcoin protocol, using a strategy now termed *selfish mining*. More specifically, any miner with $>1/3$ of…
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…