Related papers: The Power of Random Symmetry-Breaking in Nakamoto …
Extensive research on Nakamoto-style consensus protocols has shown that network delays degrade the security of these protocols. Established results indicate that, perhaps surprisingly, maximal security is achieved when the network is as…
Blockchains based on the celebrated Nakamoto consensus protocol have shown promise in several applications, including cryptocurrencies. However, these blockchains have inherent scalability limits caused by the protocol's consensus…
In the Bitcoin white paper, Nakamoto proposed a very simple Byzantine fault tolerant consensus algorithm that is also known as Nakamoto consensus. Despite its simplicity, some existing analysis of Nakamoto consensus appears to be long and…
The security of blockchain systems depends on the distribution of mining power across participants. If sufficient mining power is controlled by one entity, they can force their own version of events. This may allow them to double spend…
We investigate the time to consensus in Nakamoto blockchains. Specifically, we consider two competing growth processes, labeled \emph{honest} and \emph{adversarial}, and determine the time after which the honest process permananetly exceeds…
Formal analyses of blockchain protocols have received much attention recently. Consistency results of Nakamoto's blockchain protocol are often expressed in a quantity $c$, which denotes the expected number of network delays before some…
We study security-latency bounds for Nakamoto consensus, i.e., how secure a block is after it becomes $k$-deep in the chain. We improve the state-of-the-art bounds by analyzing the race between adversarial and honest chains in three…
It has been known for some time that the Nakamoto consensus as implemented in the Bitcoin protocol is not totally aligned with the individual interests of the participants. More precisely, it has been shown that block withholding mining…
This paper studies proof-of-work Nakamoto consensus protocols under bounded network delays, settling two long-standing questions in blockchain security: What is the most effective attack on block safety under a given block confirmation…
Nakamoto's seminal work gave rise to permissionless blockchains -- as well as a wide range of proposals to mitigate their performance shortcomings. Despite substantial throughput and energy efficiency achievements, most proposals only bring…
Simple closed-form upper and lower bounds are developed for the security of the Nakamoto consensus as a function of the confirmation depth, the honest and adversarial block mining rates, and an upper bound on the block propagation delay.…
Nakamoto double spend strategy, described in Bitcoin foundational article, leads to total ruin with positive probability and does not make sense from the profitability point of view. The simplest strategy that can be profitable incorporates…
This paper investigates the fundamental trade-offs between block safety, confirmation latency, and transaction throughput of proof-of-work (PoW) longest-chain fork-choice protocols, also known as PoW Nakamoto consensus. New upper and lower…
For Nakamoto's longest-chain consensus protocol, whose proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS) variants power major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Cardano, we revisit the classic problem of the security-performance tradeoff: Given a…
The Nakamoto consensus protocol underlying the Bitcoin blockchain uses proof of work as a voting mechanism. Honest miners who contribute hashing power towards securing the chain try to extend the longest chain they are aware of. Despite its…
In blockchain networks adopting the proof-of-work schemes, the monetary incentive is introduced by the Nakamoto consensus protocol to guide the behaviors of the full nodes (i.e., block miners) in the process of maintaining the consensus…
Traditional security models for Nakamoto-style blockchains assume instantaneous synchronization among malicious nodes, which overestimate adversarial coordination capability. We revisit these existing models and propose two more realistic…
Nakamoto consensus are the most widely adopted decentralized consensus mechanism in cryptocurrency systems. Since it was proposed in 2008, many studies have focused on analyzing its security. Most of them focus on maximizing the profit of…
Fault-tolerant distributed systems move the trust in a single party to a majority of parties participating in the protocol. This makes blockchain based crypto-currencies possible: they allow parties to agree on a total order of transactions…
Nakamoto consensus has been incredibly influential in enabling robust blockchain systems, and one of its components is the so-called heaviest chain rule (HCR). Within this rule, the calculation of the weight of the chain tip is performed by…