Related papers: Proof-of-Stake Mining Games with Perfect Randomnes…
Proof-of-stake blockchain protocols have emerged as a compelling paradigm for organizing distributed ledger systems. In proof-of-stake (PoS), a subset of stakeholders participate in validating a growing ledger of transactions. For the…
In cryptocurrencies, the block reward is meant to serve as the incentive mechanism for miners to commit resources to create blocks and in effect secure the system. Existing systems primarily divide the reward in proportion to expended…
Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the world, supported by the immense hash power of its Proof-of-Work miners, but consumes huge amount of energy. Proof-of-Stake chains are energy-efficient, have fast finality and accountability, but…
Blockchain is an essentially distributed database recording all transactions or digital events among participating parties. Each transaction in the records is approved and verified by consensus of the participants in the system that…
Consensus protocols used today in blockchains often rely on computational power or financial stakes - scarce resources. We propose a novel protocol using social capital - trust and influence from social interactions - as a non-transferable…
Proof of Stake (PoS) is a burgeoning Sybil resistance mechanism that aims to have a digital asset ("token") serve as security collateral in crypto networks. However, PoS has so far eluded a comprehensive threat model that encompasses both…
Proof-of-stake blockchain protocols are becoming one of the most promising alternatives to the energy-consuming proof-of-work protocols. However, one particularly critical threat in the PoS setting is the well-known long-range attacks…
Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, while central to achieving decentralized consensus, has long been criticized for excessive energy use and hardware inefficiencies \cite{devries2018bitcoin, truby2018decarbonizing}. This paper…
Bitcoin is the first fully-decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol to achieve a high level of security, but at the expense of poor throughput and latency. Scaling the performance of Bitcoin has a been a major recent direction of…
Open-access blockchains based on proof-of-work protocols have gained tremendous popularity for their capabilities of providing decentralized tamper-proof ledgers and platforms for data-driven autonomous organization. Nevertheless, the…
Due to its minimal energy requirement the PoS consensus protocol has become an attractive alternative to PoW in modern cryptocurrencies. In this protocol the chance of being selected as a block proposer in each round is proportional to the…
Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed block…
We introduce a new permissionless blockchain architecture called ABC. ABC is completely asynchronous, and does rely on neither randomness nor proof-of-work. ABC can be parallelized, and transactions have finality within one round trip of…
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…
Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have long been criticized for their high computational and storage overhead. Unfortunately, while a number of proposals address the energy consumption of existing Proof-of-Work deployments, little…
The idea of security sharing goes back to Nakamoto's introduction of merge mining, a technique that enables Bitcoin miners to reuse their hash power to bootstrap and secure other Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. However, with the rise of…
This paper presents an empirical evaluation of the Proof of Team Sprint (PoTS) consensus algorithm, focusing on reward fairness, energy efficiency, system stability, and scalability. We conducted large-scale simulations comparing PoTS with…
Proof of Work (PoW) is widely regarded as the most secure permissionless blockchain consensus protocol. However, its reliance on computationally intensive yet externally useless puzzles results in excessive electric energy wasting. To…
Ethereum has undergone a recent change called \textit{the Merge}, which made Ethereum a Proof-of-Stake blockchain, shifting closer to BFT consensus. Ethereum, which wished to keep the best of the two protocol designs (BFT and…
The core of many cryptocurrencies is the decentralised validation network operating on proof-of-work technology. In these systems, validation is done by so-called miners who can digitally sign blocks once they solve a computationally-hard…