Related papers: Pricing Security in Proof-of-Work Systems
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…
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…
While cryptocurrencies and blockchain applications continue to gain popularity, their energy cost is evidently becoming unsustainable. In most instances, the main cost comes from the required amount of energy for the Proof-of-Work, and this…
We revisit the longstanding open problem of implementing Nakamoto's proof-of-work (PoW) consensus based on a real-world computational task $T(x)$ (as opposed to artificial random hashing), in a truly permissionless setting where the miner…
As an emerging decentralized secure data management platform, blockchain has gained much popularity recently. To maintain a canonical state of blockchain data record, proof-of-work based consensus protocols provide the nodes, referred to as…
Open-access blockchains based on proof-of-work protocols have gained tremendous popularity for their capabilities of providing decentralized tamper-proof ledgers and platforms for data-driven autonomous organization. Nevertheless, the…
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…
Proof of Work (PoW) is a Sybil-deterrence security mechanism. It introduces an external cost to a system by requiring computational effort to perform actions. However, since its inception, a central challenge was to tune this cost. Initial…
Large proof of work (PoW) networks allow anyone to earn rewards by running computation-intensive hash puzzles for profit, yet they typically consume electricity comparable to that of medium-sized countries. Repurposing computing resources…
We introduce Auditable Proof-of-Work (APoW), a novel proof-of-work (PoW) construction inspired by Hashcash-style nonce searching, which enables the auditing of other miners' work through accountable re-scanning of the nonce space. The…
Proof-of-work (PoW) is an algorithmic tool used to secure networks by imposing a computational cost on participating devices. Unfortunately, traditional PoW schemes require that correct devices perform computational work perpetually, even…
Proof-of-stake (PoS) is a promising approach for designing efficient blockchains, where block proposers are randomly chosen with probability proportional to their stake. A primary concern with PoS systems is the "rich getting richer"…
Proof of work (PoW), as the representative consensus protocol for blockchain, consumes enormous amounts of computation and energy to determine bookkeeping rights among miners but does not achieve any practical purposes. To address the…
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?…
With the increasing adoption of the Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchain, it is timely to study the economy created by such blockchain. In this chapter, we will survey recent progress on the trading and wealth evolution in a cryptocurrency where…
A proof of work (PoW) is an important cryptographic construct enabling a party to convince others that they invested some effort in solving a computational task. Arguably, its main impact has been in the setting of cryptocurrencies such as…
The Decentralized-Consistent-Scale (DCS) Triangle defines three dimensions that illustrate the tradeoffs of the blockchain consensus mechanism. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid consensus protocol, called Deterministic Proof of Work…
This paper introduces a structural game-theoretic model to value decentralized digital assets like Bitcoin. Instead of relying on speculative beliefs, it frames the asset's price within a Rational-Expectations Security-Utility Nash…
Decentralization is a key indicator for the evaluation of public blockchains. In the past, there have been very few studies on measuring and comparing the actual level of decentralization between Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains and…
Bitcoin is the first fully-decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol to achieve a high level of security, but at the expense of poor throughput and latency. Scaling the performance of Bitcoin has a been a major recent direction of…