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We study Nash-dynamics in the context of blockchain protocols. We introduce a formal model, within which one can assess whether the Nash dynamics can lead utility-maximizing participants to defect from the "honest" protocol operation,…
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,…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular blockchain consensus algorithm that is used in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in which hashing operations are repeated until the resulting hash has certain properties. This approach uses lots of computational…
For data privacy, system reliability, and security, Blockchain technologies have become more popular in recent years. Despite its usefulness, the blockchain is vulnerable to cyber assaults; for example, in January 2019 a 51% attack on…
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…
Permissionless Proof-of-Stake (PoS) economic security is predicated on the high cost of violating consensus safety or liveness. We show that liquid staking introduces additional risks that are not captured by standard PoS economic security…
PAI Coin's Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism utilizes the double SHA-256 hashing protocol-- the same mechanism used by Bitcoin Core. This compatibility with classic Bitcoin-style mining provides low barrier to entry for PAI Coin…
Following the publication of Bitcoin's arguably most famous attack, selfish mining, various works have introduced mechanisms to enhance blockchain systems' game theoretic resilience. Some reward mechanisms, like FruitChains, have been shown…
A proof of work (PoW) blockchain protocol distributes rewards to its participants, called miners, according to their share of the total computational power. Sufficiently large miners can perform selfish mining - deviate from the protocol to…
Corruptive majority attacks, in which mining power is distributed among miners and an attacker attempts to bribe a majority of miners into participation in a majority attack, pose a threat to blockchains. Budish bounded the cost of bribing…
A soft control of the network activity through varying reward in a proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency is reported. Rewards are the necessity to incent the contributors activities (i.e., mining) in order to maintain the PoW network. Contrary…
A key component of security in decentralized blockchains is proof of opportunity cost among block producers. In the case of proof-of-work (PoW), currently used by the most prominent systems, the cost is due to spent computation. In this…
Due to its minimal energy requirement the PoS consensus protocol has become an attractive alternative to PoW in modern cryptocurrencies. In this protocol the chance of being selected as a block proposer in each round is proportional to the…
Low transaction throughput and poor scalability are significant issues in public blockchain consensus protocols such as Bitcoins. Recent research efforts in this direction have proposed shard-based consensus protocols where the key idea is…
The Bitcoin protocol prescribes certain behavior by the miners who are responsible for maintaining and extending the underlying blockchain; in particular, miners who successfully solve a puzzle, and hence can extend the chain by a block,…
Blockchain technology is widely used in various fields due to its ability to provide decentralization and trustless security. This is a fundamental understanding held by many advocates, but it is misunderstood, leading participants to fail…
Blockchain Sharding is a blockchain performance enhancement approach. By splitting a blockchain into several parallel-run committees (shards), it helps increase transaction throughput, reduce computational resources required, and increase…
The resource-consuming mining of blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol bears the risk of ruin, namely when the operational costs for the mining exceed the received rewards. In this paper we investigate to…
In blockchain networks adopting the proof-of-work schemes, the monetary incentive is introduced by the Nakamoto consensus protocol to guide the behaviors of the full nodes (i.e., block miners) in the process of maintaining the consensus…
The blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain record the amount of work W that went into creating them through proofs of work. When honest parties control a majority of the work, consensus is achieved by picking the chain with the highest recorded…