Related papers: Towards Overcoming the Undercutting Problem
Payment channel networks provide a fast and scalable solution to relay funds, acting as a second layer to slower and less scalable blockchain protocols. In this paper, we present an accessible, low-cost attack in which the attacker…
Blockchains deploy Transaction Fee Mechanisms (TFMs) to determine which user transactions to include in blocks and determine their payments (i.e., transaction fees). Increasing demand and scarce block resources have led to high user…
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…
In cryptocurrencies, the block reward is meant to serve as the incentive mechanism for miners to commit resources to create blocks and in effect secure the system. Existing systems primarily divide the reward in proportion to expended…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) is designed to improve the scalability of blockchain systems by using off-chain payment paths to settle transactions in a faster, cheaper, and more private manner. This work aims to empirically study LN's…
We consider the execution of smart contracts on Bitcoin. There, every contract step corresponds to appending to the blockchain a new transaction that spends the output representing the old contract state, creating a new one for the updated…
Our aim in this paper is to investigate the profitability of double-spending (DS) attacks that manipulate an a priori mined transaction in a blockchain. It was well understood that a successful DS attack is established when the proportion…
In Proof-of-Work blockchains, difficulty algorithms serve the crucial purpose of maintaining a stable transaction throughput by dynamically adjusting the block difficulty in response to the miners' constantly changing computational power.…
Payment channel networks like Bitcoin's Lightning network are an auspicious approach for realizing high transaction throughput and almost-instant confirmations in blockchain networks. However, the ability to successfully make payments in…
Blockchain systems often rely on rationality assumptions for their security, expecting that nodes are motivated to maximize their profits. These systems thus design their protocols to incentivize nodes to execute the honest protocol but…
Off-chain transaction channels represent one of the leading techniques to scale the transaction throughput in cryptocurrencies. However, the economic effect of transaction channels on the system has not been explored much until now. We…
Blockchains use peer-to-peer networks for disseminating information among peers, but these networks currently do not have any provable guarantees for desirable properties such as Byzantine fault tolerance, good connectivity and small…
Micropayment channels are the most prominent solution to the limitation on transaction throughput in current blockchain systems. However, in practice channels are risky because participants have to be online constantly to avoid fraud, and…
Modern blockchains increasingly rely on parallel execution to improve throughput. We show several industry and academic transaction fee mechanisms (TFMs) struggle to simultaneously account for execution parallelism while remaining…
The world-changing blockchain technique provides a novel method to establish a secure, trusted and decentralized system for solving the security and personal privacy problems in Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT) applications. The mining…
Bitcoin already faces a quantum threat through Shor attacks on elliptic-curve signatures. This paper isolates the other component that public discussion often conflates with it: mining. Grover's algorithm halves the exponent of brute-force…
Off-chain transaction networks can mitigate the scalability issues of today's trustless electronic cash systems such as Bitcoin. However, these peer-to-peer networks also introduce a new attack surface which is not well-understood today.…
Transaction Fee Mechanism Design studies auctions run by untrusted miners for transaction inclusion in a blockchain. Under previously-considered desiderata, an auction is considered `good' if, informally-speaking, each party (i.e., the…
Blockchain systems come with the promise of being inclusive for a variety of decentralized applications (DApps) that can serve different purposes and have different urgency requirements. Despite this, the transaction fee mechanisms…
Blockchains have popularized automated market makers (AMMs). An AMM exchange is an application running on a blockchain which maintains a pool of crypto-assets and automatically trades assets with users governed by some pricing function that…