Related papers: Selfish Mining Attacks Exacerbated by Elastic Hash…
Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not…
Traditional blockchains grant the miner of a block full control not only over which transactions but also their order. This constitutes a major flaw discovered with the introduction of decentralized finance and allows miners to perform MEV…
What happens to mining when the Bitcoin price changes, when there are mining supply shocks, the price of energy changes, or hardware technology evolves? We give precise answers based on the technical forces and incentives in the system. We…
Pool block withholding attack is performed among mining pools in digital cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Instead of mining honestly, pools can be incentivized to infiltrate their own miners into other pools. These infiltrators report…
For a mining strategy we define the notion of "profit lag" as the minimum time it takes to be profitable after that moment. We compute closed forms for the profit lag and the revenue ratio for the strategies "selfish mining" and…
In this paper, we explore the partitioning attacks on the Bitcoin network, which is shown to exhibit spatial bias, and temporal and logical diversity. Through data-driven study we highlight: 1) the centralization of Bitcoin nodes across…
In this paper we revisit some major orthodoxies which lie at the heart of the bitcoin crypto currency and its numerous clones. In particular we look at The Longest Chain Rule, the monetary supply policies and the exact mechanisms which…
Blockchain protocols implement total-order broadcast in a permissionless setting, where processes can freely join and leave. In such a setting, to safeguard against Sybil attacks, correct processes rely on cryptographic proofs tied to a…
Although Bitcoin was intended to be a decentralized digital currency, in practice, mining power is quite concentrated. This fact is a persistent source of concern for the Bitcoin community. We provide an explanation using a simple model to…
Propelled by the growth of large-scale blockchain deployments, much recent progress has been made in designing sharding protocols that achieve throughput scaling linearly in the number of nodes. However, existing protocols are not robust to…
We develop a model of stable assets, including non-custodial stablecoins backed by cryptocurrencies. Such stablecoins are popular methods for bootstrapping price stability within public blockchain settings. We derive fundamental results…
We study an auction with $m$ identical items in a context where $n$ agents can arbitrarily commit to strategies. In general, such commitments non-trivially change the equilibria by inducing a metagame of choosing which strategies to commit…
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…
Conflicting transactions within blockchain networks not only pose performance challenges but also introduce security vulnerabilities, potentially facilitating malicious attacks. In this paper, we explore the impact of conflicting…
In this work, we reexamine the vulnerability of Payment Channel Networks (PCNs) to bribing attacks, where an adversary incentivizes blockchain miners to deliberately ignore a specific transaction to undermine the punishment mechanism of…
Today's world is organized based on merit and value. A single global currency that's decentralized is needed for a global economy. Bitcoin is a partial solution to this need, however it suffers from scalability problems which prevent it…
Proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin secure vast amounts of money. Their operators, called miners, expend resources to generate blocks and receive monetary rewards for their effort. Blockchains are, in principle,…
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…
Mining fairness in blockchain refers to equality between the computational resources invested in mining and the block rewards received. There exists a dilemma wherein increasing the transaction processing capacity of a blockchain…
We study the strategic implications that arise from adding one extra option to the miners participating in the bitcoin protocol. We propose that when adding a block, miners also have the ability to pay forward an amount to be collected by…