Related papers: Towards Overcoming the Undercutting Problem
Blockchain is a technology that provides a distributed ledger that stores previous records while maintaining consistency and security. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized electronic cryptographic system that uses blockchain…
Mining attacks allow adversaries to obtain a disproportionate share of the mining reward by deviating from the honest mining strategy in the Bitcoin system. Among them, the most well-known are selfish mining (SM), block withholding (BWH),…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency has received much attention recently. In the network of Bitcoin, transactions are recorded in a ledger. In this network, the process of recording transactions depends on some nodes called miners that execute a…
Bitcoin is a representative decentralized currency system. For the security of Bitcoin, fairness in the distribution of mining rewards plays a crucial role in preventing the concentration of computational power in a few miners. Here,…
We describe and analyze perishing mining, a novel block-withholding mining strategy that lures profit-driven miners away from doing useful work on the public chain by releasing block headers from a privately maintained chain. We then…
We revisit the fundamental question of Bitcoin's security against double spending attacks. While previous work has bounded the probability that a transaction is reversed, we show that no such guarantee can be effectively given if the…
We study selfish mining in Ethereum. The problem is combinatorially more complex than in Bitcoin because of major differences in the reward system and a different difficulty adjustment formula. Equivalent strategies in Bitcoin do have…
Cryptocurrencies employ auction-esque transaction fee mechanisms (TFMs) to allocate transactions to blocks, and to determine how much fees miners can collect from transactions. Several impossibility results show that TFMs that satisfy a…
We study the strategic considerations of miners participating in the bitcoin's protocol. We formulate and study the stochastic game that underlies these strategic considerations. The miners collectively build a tree of blocks, and they are…
Mining blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol is well-known to be resource-consuming. A miner bears the operational cost, mainly electricity consumption and IT gear, of mining, and is compensated by a…
In this paper we revisit the mining strategies in proof of work based cryptocurrencies and propose two strategies, we call smart and smarter mining, that in many cases strictly dominate honest mining. In contrast to other known attacks,…
We develop a dynamic model of the Bitcoin market where users set fees themselves and miners decide whether to operate and whom to validate based on those fees. Our analysis reveals how, in equilibrium, users adjust their bids in response to…
In a Proof-of-Work blockchain such as Bitcoin mining hashrate is increasing in the block reward. An increase in hashrate reduces network vulnerability to attack (a reduction in security cost) while increasing carbon emissions and…
Proof-of-work computation used in cryptocurrencies has witnessed significant growth in the U.S. and many other regions around the world. One of the most significant bottlenecks for the scalable deployment of such computation is its energy…
In this work, we reexamine the vulnerability of Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) to bribing attacks, where an adversary incentivizes blockchain miners to deliberately ignore a specific transaction to undermine the punishment mechanism of…
Eyal and Sirer's selfish mining strategy has demonstrated that Bitcoin system is not secure even if 50% of total mining power is held by altruistic miners. Since then, researchers have been investigating either to improve the efficiency of…
The Lightning Network promises to alleviate Bitcoin's known scalability problems. The operation of such second layer approaches relies on the ability of participants to turn to the blockchain to claim funds at any time, which is assumed to…
Bitcoin's (BTC) Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) has been a source of vulnerability for incentive attacks such as selfish mining, block withholding and coin hopping strategies. In this paper, first, we rigorously study the short-term…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography which has recently gained excessive popularity. Scientific research on bitcoin is less abundant. A paper at Financial Cryptography 2012…
Mining fairness in blockchain refers to equality between the computational resources invested in mining and the block rewards received. There exists a dilemma wherein increasing the transaction processing capacity of a blockchain…