Related papers: Towards Overcoming the Undercutting Problem
Clients of permissionless blockchain systems, like Bitcoin, rely on an underlying peer-to-peer network to send and receive transactions. It is critical that a client is connected to at least one honest peer, as otherwise the client can be…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) is value extractable by temporary monopoly power commonly found in decentralized systems. This extraction stems from a lack of user privacy upon transaction submission and the ability of a monopolist…
In blockchain, bribery is an inevitable problem since users with various goals can bribe miners by transferring cryptoassets. To alleviate the negative effects of such collusion, Ethereum blockchain implemented new transaction fee mechanism…
Bitcoin, as well as many of its successors, require the whole transaction record to be reliably acquired by all nodes to prevent double-spending. Recently, many blockchains have been proposed to achieve scale-out throughput by letting nodes…
Bribery is a perilous issue in the real world, especially in an economical aspect. This fraudulence is unavoidable, and more importantly, it is more difficult to trace in case smart contracts are utilized for bribing on a distributed public…
Motivated by the great success and adoption of Bitcoin, a number of cryptocurrencies such as Litecoin, Dogecoin, and Ethereum are becoming increasingly popular. Although existing blockchain-based cryptocurrency schemes can ensure reasonable…
Researchers have discovered a series of theoretical attacks against Bitcoin's Nakamoto consensus; the most damaging ones are selfish mining, double-spending, and consistency delay attacks. These attacks have one common cause: block…
The rise of smart contract systems such as Ethereum has resulted in a proliferation of blockchain-based decentralized applications including applications that store and manage a wide range of data. Current smart contracts are designed to be…
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain PoW consensus on how the existence of multiple misbehaving miners influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner (or attacker interchangeably)…
This paper develops a model to evaluate the viability of blockchain markets as the sole venue for price formation. Blockchains clear at discrete intervals called block time, and transactions are executed sequentially according to priority…
Existing fair exchange protocols usually neglect consideration of cost when assessing their fairness. However, in an environment with non-negligible transaction cost, e.g., public blockchains, high or unexpected transaction cost might be an…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. Attempts to address this challenge include layer-2 solutions, such as Bitcoin's Lightning or Ethereum's…
Traditional blockchain design gives miners or validators full control over transaction ordering, i.e., they can freely choose which transactions to include or exclude, as well as in which order. While not an issue initially, the emergence…
The year 2024 witnessed a major development in the cryptocurrency industry with the long-awaited approval of spot Bitcoin exchange-traded funds (ETFs). This innovation provides investors with a new, regulated path to gain exposure to…
Despite the tremendous interest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum today, many aspects of the underlying consensus protocols are poorly understood. Therefore, the search for protocols that improve either throughput or security…
We study the following problem that is motivated by Blockchains where ``miners'' are serially given the monopoly for assembling transactions into the next block. Our model has a single good that is sold repeatedly every day where new demand…
Most current assessments use ex post proxies that miss uncertainty and fail to consistently capture the rapid change in bitcoin mining. We introduce a unified, ex ante statistical model that derives expected return, downside risk, and…
Users bid in a transaction fee mechanism (TFM) to get their transactions included and confirmed by a blockchain protocol. Roughgarden (EC'21) initiated the formal treatment of TFMs and proposed three requirements: user incentive…
The consensus protocol named proof of work (PoW) is widely applied by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Although security of a PoW cryptocurrency is always the top priority, it is threatened by mining attacks like selfish mining. Researchers…
We identify a subtle security issue that impacts the design of smart contracts, because agents may themselves deploy smart contracts (side contracts). Typically, equilibria of games are analyzed in vitro, under the assumption that players…