Related papers: HaPPY-Mine: Designing a Mining Reward Function
We study to what extent the Bitcoin blockchain security permanently depends on the underlying distribution of cryptocurrency market outcomes. We use daily blockchain and Bitcoin data for 2014-2019 and employ the ARDL approach. We test three…
Abrupt changes in the miner hash rate applied to a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain can adversely affect user experience and security. Because different PoW blockchains often share hashing algorithms, miners face a complex choice in deciding…
Consider a set of parties invited to execute a protocol $\Pi$. The protocol will incur some cost to run while in the end (or at regular intervals), it will populate and update local tables that assign (virtual) rewards to participants. Each…
To maintain blockchain-based services with ensuring its security, it is an important issue how to decide a mining reward so that the number of miners participating in the mining increases. We propose a dynamical model of decision-making for…
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…
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…
Mining in proof-of-work blockchains has become an expensive affair requiring specialized hardware capable of executing several megahashes per second at huge electricity costs. Miners earn a reward each time they mine a block within the…
We study the incentives behind double-spend attacks on Nakamoto-style Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies. In these systems, miners are allowed to choose which transactions to reference with their block, and a common strategy for selecting…
Blockchains have witnessed widespread adoption in the past decade in various fields. The growing demand makes their scalability and sustainability challenges more evident than ever. As a result, more and more blockchains have begun to adopt…
Mining processes of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are currently incentivized with voluntary transaction fees and fixed block rewards which will halve gradually to zero. In the setting where optional and arbitrary transaction fee…
We develop a dynamic model of the Bitcoin market where users set fees themselves and miners decide whether to operate and whom to validate based on those fees. Our analysis reveals how, in equilibrium, users adjust their bids in response to…
Blockchain plays a crucial role in ensuring the security and integrity of decentralized systems, with the proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism being fundamental for achieving distributed consensus. As PoW blockchains see broader adoption, an…
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…
It is interesting but difficult and challenging to study Ethereum with multiple mining pools. One of the main difficulties comes from not only how to represent such a general tree with multiple block branches (or sub-chains) related to the…
Bitcoin is a representative decentralized currency system. For the security of Bitcoin, fairness in the distribution of mining rewards plays a crucial role in preventing the concentration of computational power in a few miners. Here,…
We make several contributions that quantify the real-time hash rate and therefore the consensus of a blockchain. We show that by using only the hash value of blocks, we can estimate and measure the hash rate of all miners or individual…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
The security of Bitcoin protocols is deeply dependent on the incentives provided to miners, which come from a combination of block rewards and transaction fees. As Bitcoin experiences more halving events, the protocol reward converges to…
In this paper, we provide a new theoretical framework of pyramid Markov processes to solve some open and fundamental problems of blockchain selfish mining under a rigorous mathematical setting. We first describe a more general model of…
We study a game-theoretic model of blockchain mining economies and show that griefing, a practice according to which participants harm other participants at some lesser cost to themselves, is a prevalent threat at its Nash equilibria. The…