Related papers: Towards Overcoming the Undercutting Problem
Popular cryptocurrencies continue to face serious scalability issues due to their ever-growing blockchains. Thus, modern blockchain designs began to prune old blocks and rely on recent snapshots for their bootstrapping processes instead.…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…
Blockchains have block-size limits to ensure the entire cluster can keep up with the tip of the chain. These block-size limits are usually single-dimensional, but richer multidimensional constraints allow for greater throughput. The…
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…
Trading through decentralized exchanges (DEXs) has become crucial in today's blockchain ecosystem, enabling users to swap tokens efficiently and automatically. However, the capacity of miners to strategically order transactions has led to…
The successive generations of consensus algorithms have progressively shifted the performance bottleneck of blockchains to the execution layer. While recent works address this by parallelizing transaction execution, they often overlook the…
In Aug. 2017, Bitcoin was split into the original Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Since then, miners have had a choice between BTC and BCH mining because they have compatible proof-of-work algorithms. Therefore, they can freely choose…
In blockchain systems, the scarcity of a resource is used as a Sybil protection mechanism. In Proof-of-Work blockchains, that resource is computing power. In the event of a fork, the scarcity of this resource theoretically prevents miners…
Bitcoin's security relies on its Proof-of-Work consensus, where miners solve puzzles to propose blocks. The puzzle's difficulty is set by the difficulty adjustment mechanism (DAM), based on the network's available mining power. Attacks that…
Recent works of Roughgarden (EC'21) and Chung and Shi (SODA'23) initiate the study of a new decentralized mechanism design problem called transaction fee mechanism design (TFM). Unlike the classical mechanism design literature, in the…
Proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies rely on a balance of security and fairness in order to maintain a sustainable ecosystem of miners and users. Users demand fast and consistent transaction confirmation, and in exchange drive the adoption…
It is an important decision-making problem for a miner in the blockchain networks if he/she participates in the mining so that he/she earns a reward by creating a new block earlier than other miners. We formulate this decision-making…
Cryptocurrency off-chain networks such as Lightning (e.g., Bitcoin) or Raiden (e.g., Ethereum) aim to increase the scalability of traditional on-chain transactions. To support nodes in learning about possible paths to route their…
Blockchains offer strong security gurarantees, but cannot protect users against the ordering of transactions. Players such as miners, bots and validators can reorder various transactions and reap significant profits, called the Maximal…
Bitcoin is a decentralised digital currency that serves as an alternative to existing transaction systems based on an external central authority for security. Although Bitcoin has many desirable properties, one of its fundamental…
Smart contract platforms facilitate the development of important and diverse distributed applications in a simple manner. This simplicity stems from the inherent utility of employing the state of smart contracts to store, query and verify…
Blockchains lie at the heart of Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies that have shown great promise to revolutionize finance and commerce. Although they are gaining increasing popularity, they face technical challenges when it comes to scaling…
Abrupt changes in the miner hash rate applied to a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain can adversely affect user experience and security. Because different PoW blockchains often share hashing algorithms, miners face a complex choice in deciding…
While blockchains initially gained popularity in the realm of cryptocurrencies, their widespread adoption is expanding beyond conventional applications, driven by the imperative need for enhanced data security. Despite providing a secure…
Cryptographic Self-Selection is a common primitive underlying leader-selection for Proof-of-Stake blockchain protocols. The concept was first popularized in Algorand [CM19], who also observed that the protocol might be manipulable. [FHWY22]…