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Since 2016, sharding has become an auspicious solution to tackle the scalability issue in legacy blockchain systems. Despite its potential to strongly boost the blockchain throughput, sharding comes with its own security issues. To ease the…
Miners in a blockchain system are suffering from ever-increasing storage costs, which in general have not been properly compensated by the users' transaction fees. This reduces the incentives for the miners' participation and may jeopardize…
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…
The core of many cryptocurrencies is the decentralised validation network operating on proof-of-work technology. In these systems, validation is done by so-called miners who can digitally sign blocks once they solve a computationally-hard…
The widespread adoption of blockchain technology has amplified the spectrum of potential threats to its integrity and security. The ongoing quest to exploit vulnerabilities emphasizes how critical it is to expand on current research…
Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency, and an accompanying protocol, created in 2008. Bitcoin nodes continuously generate and propagate blocks---collections of newly approved transactions that are added to Bitcoin's ledger. Block…
We analyze Qubic's publicly claimed selfish mining attack against Monero in 2025. By combining measurements from Monero nodes, the Qubic pool API, and Qubic-network observations, we reconstruct Qubic-attributed blocks and effective hashrate…
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…
Owing to some special characteristics and features, blockchain is a very useful technique that can securely organize diverse devices in a smart city. It finds wide applications, especially in distributed environments, where entities such as…
This paper presents a novel staking coopetition design aimed at incentivizing decentralization and continuous growth of economic security within a proof-of-stake system. Staking rewards follow a nonlinear mapping relative to stake size.…
On several proof-of-stake blockchains, agents engaged in validating transactions can open a pool to which others can delegate their stake in order to earn higher returns. We develop a model of staking pool formation in the presence of…
Blockchain technology emerged with the advent of Bitcoin and rapidly developed over the past few decades, becoming widely accepted and known by the public. However, in the past decades, the massive adoption of blockchain technology has yet…
In the proof-of-stake (PoS) paradigm for maintaining decentralized, permissionless cryptocurrencies, Sybil attacks are prevented by basing the distribution of roles in the protocol execution on the stake distribution recorded in the ledger…
Smart Contracts and transactions allow users to implement elaborate constructions on cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Many of these constructions, including operational payment channels and atomic swaps, use a building…
Proof of work cryptocurrencies began with the promise of a more egalitarian future with a decentralized monetary system with no powerful entities in charge. While this vision is far from realized, these cryptocurrencies are still touted to…
Although proof of work (PoW) consensus dominates the current blockchain-based systems mostly, it has always been criticized for the uneconomic brute-force calculation. As alternatives, energy-conservation and energy-recycling mechanisms…
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…
We propose DIPS Difficulty-based Incentives for Problem Solving), a simple modification of the Bitcoin proof-of-work algorithm that rewards blockchain miners for solving optimization problems of scientific interest. The result is a…
Most PoW blockchain protocols operate with a simple mechanism whereby a threshold is set for each block and miners generate block hashes until one of those values falls below the threshold. Although largely effective, this mechanism…
An attacker who breaks into an authentication server and steals all of the cryptographic password hashes is able to mount an offline-brute force attack against each user's password. Offline brute-force attacks against passwords are…