Related papers: HaPPY-Mine: Designing a Mining Reward Function
In an age where sustainability is of paramount importance, the significance of both high-performance computing and intelligent algorithms cannot be understated. Yet, these domains often demand hefty computational power, translating to…
Like most modern blockchain networks, Ethereum has relied on economic incentives to promote honest participation in the chain's consensus. The distributed character of the platform, together with the "randomness" or "luck" factor that both…
The Bitcoin protocol prescribes certain behavior by the miners who are responsible for maintaining and extending the underlying blockchain; in particular, miners who successfully solve a puzzle, and hence can extend the chain by a block,…
Cryptocurrency achieves distributed consensus using proof of work (PoW). Prior research in blockchain security identified financially incentivized attacks based on withholding blocks which have the attacker compromise a victim pool and pose…
Smart contracts, the stateful programs running on blockchains, often rely on reports. Publishers are paid to publish these reports on the blockchain. Designing protocols that incentivize timely reporting is the prevalent reporting problem.…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…
The goal of this paper is to rigorously interrogate conventional wisdom about centralization in block-building (due to, e.g., MEV and private order flow) and the outsourcing of block-building by validators to specialists (i.e.,…
In the Bitcoin system, miners are incentivized to join the system and validate transactions through fees paid by the users. A simple "pay your bid" auction has been employed to determine the transaction fees. Recently, Lavi, Sattath and…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…
Bitcoin-NG is among the first blockchain protocols to approach the \emph{near-optimal} throughput by decoupling blockchain operation into two planes: leader election and transaction serialization. Its decoupling idea has inspired a new…
The present dissertation addresses the problem of fairly distributing shared resources in non-commercial blockchain networks. Blockchains are distributed systems that order and timestamp records of a given network of users, in a public,…
Forks in the Bitcoin network result from the natural competition in the blockchain's Proof-of-Work consensus protocol. Their frequency is a critical indicator for the efficiency of a distributed ledger as they can contribute to resource…
Mining attacks enable an adversary to procure a disproportionately large portion of mining rewards by deviating from honest mining practices within the PoW-based blockchain system. In this paper, we demonstrate that the security…
We introduce and study reward sharing schemes (RSS) that promote the fair formation of {\em stake pools}\ in collaborative projects that involve a large number of stakeholders such as the maintenance of a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.…
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…
The security of most existing cryptocurrencies is based on a concept called Proof-of-Work, in which users must solve a computationally hard cryptopuzzle to authorize transactions (`one unit of computation, one vote'). This leads to enormous…
Many of the recent works on the profitability of rogue mining strategies hinge on a parameter called $\gamma$ that measures the proportion of the honest network attracted by the attacker to mine on top of his fork. These works, see…
This paper opts to mitigate the energy-inefficiency of the Blockchain Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm by rationally repurposing the power spent during the mining process. The original PoW mining scheme is designed to consider one…
Proof-of-work computation used in cryptocurrencies has witnessed significant growth in the U.S. and many other regions around the world. One of the most significant bottlenecks for the scalable deployment of such computation is its energy…
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…