Related papers: HaPPY-Mine: Designing a Mining Reward Function
We argue that the current POW based consensus algorithm of the Bitcoin network suffers from a fundamental economic discrepancy between the real world transaction (txn) costs incurred by miners and the wealth that is being transacted. Put…
Relay Mining presents a scalable solution employing probabilistic mechanisms, crypto-economic incentives, and new cryptographic primitives to estimate and prove the volume of Remote Procedure Calls (RPCs) made from a client to a server.…
Tendermint-core blockchains (e.g. Cosmos) are considered today one of the most viable alternatives for the highly energy consuming proof-of-work blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Their particularity is that they aim at offering…
Blockchain protocols incentivize participation through monetary rewards, assuming rational actors behave honestly to maximize their gains. However, attackers may attempt to harm others even at personal cost. These denial of profit attacks…
Proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies rely on a balance of security and fairness in order to maintain a sustainable ecosystem of miners and users. Users demand fast and consistent transaction confirmation, and in exchange drive the adoption…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom…
We study selfish mining in Ethereum. The problem is combinatorially more complex than in Bitcoin because of major differences in the reward system and a different difficulty adjustment formula. Equivalent strategies in Bitcoin do have…
We study a game-theoretic model for pool formation in Proof of Stake blockchain protocols. In such systems, stakeholders can form pools as a means of obtaining regular rewards from participation in ledger maintenance, with the power of each…
Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency, and an accompanying protocol, created in 2008. Bitcoin nodes continuously generate and propagate blocks---collections of newly approved transactions that are added to Bitcoin's ledger. Block…
Mining is the important part of the blockchain used the proof of work (PoW) on its consensus, looking for the matching block through testing a number of hash calculations. In order to attract more hash computing power, the miner who finds…
The rewards a blockchain miner earns vary with time. Most of the time is spent mining without receiving any rewards, and only occasionally the miner wins a block and earns a reward. Mining pools smoothen the stochastic flow of rewards, and…
An open distributed system can be secured by requiring participants to present proof of work and rewarding them for participation. The Bitcoin digital currency introduced this mechanism, which is adopted by almost all contemporary digital…
Blockchain is a technology that provides a distributed ledger that stores previous records while maintaining consistency and security. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized electronic cryptographic system that uses blockchain…
Proof-of-Stake systems randomly choose, on each round, one of the participants as a consensus leader that extends the chain with the next block such that the selection probability is proportional to the owned stake. However, distributed…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain…
We analyze Bitcoin mining from the perspective of a game and propose an optimal mining model that maximizes profits of pools and miners. The model is a two-stage Stackelberg game in which each stage forms a sub-game. In stage I, pools are…
Mining blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol is well-known to be resource-consuming. A miner bears the operational cost, mainly electricity consumption and IT gear, of mining, and is compensated by a…
The pool-hopping attack casts down the expected profits of both the mining pool and honest miners in Blockchain. The mainstream countermeasures, namely PPS (pay-per-share) and PPLNS (pay-per-last-N-share), can hedge pool hopping, but pose a…
Proof of work cryptocurrencies began with the promise of a more egalitarian future with a decentralized monetary system with no powerful entities in charge. While this vision is far from realized, these cryptocurrencies are still touted to…
Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by miners to steal block rewards. In this paper, we explore a new form of selfish mining attack that guarantees high rewards with low cost. We show the feasibility of…