Related papers: HaPPY-Mine: Designing a Mining Reward Function
Public blockchains, though renowned for their transparency and immutability, suffer from significant privacy concerns. Network-level analysis and long-term observation of publicly available transactions can often be used to infer user…
Blockchains have sparked global interest in recent years, gaining importance as they increasingly influence technology and finance. This thesis investigates the robustness of blockchain protocols, specifically focusing on Ethereum…
In this paper we revisit the mining strategies in proof of work based cryptocurrencies and propose two strategies, we call smart and smarter mining, that in many cases strictly dominate honest mining. In contrast to other known attacks,…
Cryptocurrencies that are based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) often rely on special purpose hardware to perform so-called mining operations that secure the system, with miners receiving freshly minted tokens as a reward for their work. A notable…
Low transaction throughput and poor scalability are significant issues in public blockchain consensus protocols such as Bitcoins. Recent research efforts in this direction have proposed shard-based consensus protocols where the key idea is…
Maximal Extractable Value (MEV) has emerged as a new frontier in the design of blockchain systems. In this paper, we propose making the MEV extraction rate as part of the protocol design space. Our aim is to leverage this parameter to…
Understanding the strategic behavior of miners in a blockchain is of great importance for its proper operation. A common model for mining games considers an infinite time horizon, with players optimizing asymptotic average objectives.…
We study the strategic considerations of miners participating in the bitcoin's protocol. We formulate and study the stochastic game that underlies these strategic considerations. The miners collectively build a tree of blocks, and they are…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus is traditionally analyzed under the assumption that all miners incur similar costs per unit of computational effort. In reality, costs vary due to factors such as regional electricity cost differences and…
Bitcoin and other similar digital currencies on blockchains are not ideal means for payment, because their prices tend to go up in the long term (thus people are incentivized to hoard those currencies), and to fluctuate widely in the short…
Mining attacks aim to gain an unfair share of extra rewards in the blockchain mining. Selfish mining can preserve discovered blocks and strategically release them, wasting honest miners' computing resources and getting higher profits.…
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain PoW consensus on how the existence of multiple misbehaving miners influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner (or attacker interchangeably)…
A decentralized blockchain is a distributed ledger that is often used as a platform for exchanging goods and services. This ledger is maintained by a network of nodes that obeys a set of rules, called a consensus protocol, which helps to…
Blockchains rely on economic incentives to ensure secure and decentralised operation, making incentive compatibility a core design concern. However, protocols are rarely deployed in isolation. Applications interact with the underlying…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…
Blockchain systems are designed to produce blocks at a constant average rate. The most popular systems currently employ a Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm as a means of creating these blocks. Bitcoin produces, on average, one block every 10…
Since the invention of Bitcoin one decade ago, numerous cryptocurrencies have sprung into existence. Among these, proof-of-work is the most common mechanism for achieving consensus, whilst a number of coins have adopted "ASIC-resistance" as…
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain on how the existence of multiple misbehaving pools influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner maintains a private chain and makes it…
Eyal and Sirer's selfish mining strategy has demonstrated that Bitcoin system is not secure even if 50% of total mining power is held by altruistic miners. Since then, researchers have been investigating either to improve the efficiency of…
The blockchain paradigm provides a mechanism for content dissemination and distributed consensus on Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks. While this paradigm has been widely adopted in industry, it has not been carefully analyzed in terms of its…