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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…
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…
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…
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…
The main goal of this article is to present a direct approach for the formula giving the long-term apparent hashrates of Selfish Mining strategies using only elementary probabilities and combinatorics, more precisely, Dyck words. We can…
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…
Bitcoin-NG is an extensible blockchain protocol based on the same trust model as Bitcoin. It divides each epoch into one Key-Block and multiple Micro-Blocks, effectively improving transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG adopts a special…
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…
In this paper, we address the critical challenges of double-spending and selfish mining attacks in blockchain-based digital currencies. Double-spending is a problem where the same tender is spent multiple times during a digital currency…
Illicit crypto-mining leverages resources stolen from victims to mine cryptocurrencies on behalf of criminals. While recent works have analyzed one side of this threat, i.e.: web-browser cryptojacking, only commercial reports have partially…
It is an important decision-making problem for a miner in the blockchain networks if he/she participates in the mining so that he/she earns a reward by creating a new block earlier than other miners. We formulate this decision-making…
Credit allows a lender to loan out surplus capital to a borrower. In the traditional economy, credit bears the risk that the borrower may default on its debt, the lender hence requires upfront collateral from the borrower, plus interest fee…
Different types of malicious activities have been flagged in multiple permissionless blockchains such as bitcoin, Ethereum etc. While some malicious activities exploit vulnerabilities in the infrastructure of the blockchain, some target its…
Incentive mechanisms are central to the functionality of permissionless blockchains: they incentivize participants to run and secure the underlying consensus protocol. Designing incentive-compatible incentive mechanisms is notoriously…
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…
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,…
This paper extends the blockchain sustainability framework of Budish (2018) to consider proof of stake (in addition to proof of work) consensus mechanisms and permissioned (where the number of nodes are fixed) networks. It is demonstrated…
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…
In a PoW-based blockchain network, mining pools (the solo miner could be regarded as a mining pool containing one miner) compete to successfully mine blocks to pursue rewards. Generally, the rewards include the fixed block subsidies and…
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…