Related papers: PoSAT: Proof-of-Work Availability and Unpredictabi…
Distributed ledger technology has gained wide popularity and adoption since the emergence of bitcoin in 2008 which is based on proof of work (PoW). It is a distributed, transparent and immutable database of records of all the transactions…
Popular Ethereum wallets (like MetaMask) entrust centralized infrastructure providers (e.g., Infura) to run the consensus client logic on their behalf. As a result, these wallets are light-weight and high-performant, but come with security…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…
Proof-of-work allows Bitcoin to boast security amidst arbitrary fluctuations in participation of miners throughout time, so long as, at any point in time, a majority of hash power is honest. In recent years, however, the pendulum has…
The protocol for cryptocurrencies can be divided into three parts, namely consensus, wallet, and networking overlay. The aim of the consensus part is to bring trustless rational peer-to-peer nodes to an agreement to the current status of…
Proofs of Retrievability (PoRs) are protocols which allow a client to store data remotely and to efficiently ensure, via audits, that the entirety of that data is still intact. A dynamic PoR system also supports efficient retrieval and…
Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have long been criticized for their high computational and storage overhead. Unfortunately, while a number of proposals address the energy consumption of existing Proof-of-Work deployments, little…
Blockchain technology has become a trusted method for establishing secure and transparent transactions through a distributed, encrypted network. The operation of blockchain is governed by consensus algorithms, among which Proof of Stake…
Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency that records alltransactions in a distributed append-only public ledger calledblockchain. The security of Bitcoin heavily relies on the incentive-compatible proof-of-work (PoW) based distributed consensus…
Cryptocurrencies that are based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) often rely on special purpose hardware to perform so-called mining operations that secure the system, with miners receiving freshly minted tokens as a reward for their work. A notable…
Proof-of-work blockchains reward each miner for one completed block by an amount that is, in expectation, proportional to the number of hashes the miner contributed to the mining of the block. Is this proportional allocation rule optimal?…
The core of a blockchain network is its consensus algorithm. Starting with the Proof-of-Work, there have been various versions of consensus algorithms, such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS), Proof-of-Authority (PoA), and Practical Byzantine Fault…
Mining blocks in a blockchain using the \textit{Proof-of-Work} consensus protocol involves significant risk, as network participants face continuous operational costs while earning infrequent capital gains upon successfully mining a block.…
In this paper, we informally introduce the Pulsar proof of stake consensus paper and discuss the relevant design decisions and considerations. The Pulsar protocol we propose is designed to facilitate the creation of a proof of stake…
We present parallel proof-of-work with DAG-style voting, a novel proof-of-work cryptocurrency protocol that, compared to Bitcoin, provides better consistency guarantees, higher transaction throughput, lower transaction confirmation latency,…
This paper examines the economic and security implications of Proof-of-Stake (POS) designs, providing a survey of POS design choices and their underlying economic principles in prominent POS-blockchains. The paper argues that…
Blockchain technology and, more generally, distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems, face public scrutiny for their energy consumption levels. However, many point out that high energy consumption is a feature of (small block size)…
We introduce Unity Interleave, a new consensus algorithm for public blockchain settings. It is an eventual consistency protocol merging the Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) into a coherent stochastic process. It builds upon…
Proofs of Retrievability are protocols which allow a Client to store data remotely and to efficiently ensure, via audits, that the entirety of that data is still intact. Dynamic Proofs of Retrievability (DPoR) also support efficient…
Proof-of-stake blockchains require consensus protocols that support Dynamic Availability and Reconfiguration (so-called DAR setting), where the former means that the consensus protocol should remain live even if a large number of nodes…