Related papers: Blockchain Mining with Multiple Selfish Miners
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular consensus protocol used by Bitcoin since its inception. PoW has the well-known flaw of assigning all the reward to the single miner (or pool) that inserts the new block. This has the consequence of making…
This paper extends the blockchain sustainability framework of Budish (2018) to consider proof of stake (in addition to proof of work) consensus mechanisms and permissioned (where the number of nodes are fixed) networks. It is demonstrated…
We study Nash-dynamics in the context of blockchain protocols. We introduce a formal model, within which one can assess whether the Nash dynamics can lead utility-maximizing participants to defect from the "honest" protocol operation,…
We analyze the economic incentives generated by the proof-of-stake mechanism discussed in the Ethereum Casper upgrade proposal. Compared with proof-of-work, proof-of-stake has a different cost structure for attackers. In Budish (2018),…
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…
This work applies reinforcement learning (RL) from the AI machine learning field to derive an optimal Bitcoin-like blockchain mining strategy without knowing the details of the blockchain network model. Previously, the most profitable…
Blockchain systems often employ proof-of-work consensus protocols to validate and add transactions into hashchains. These protocols stimulate competition among miners in solving cryptopuzzles (e.g. SHA-256 hash computation in Bitcoin) in…
In this paper, we represent the problem of selecting miners within a blockchain-based system as a subset selection problem. We formulate the problem of minimising blockchain energy consumption as an optimisation problem with two conflicting…
Proof-of-Work mining is intended to provide blockchains with robustness against double-spend attacks. However, an economic analysis that follows from Budish (2018), which considers free entry conditions together with the ability to rent…
Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have excelled at financial services. Yet, opportunistic traders extract monetary value from the mesh of decentralized finance (DeFi) smart contracts through so-called blockchain extractable value…
The blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain record the amount of work W that went into creating them through proofs of work. When honest parties control a majority of the work, consensus is achieved by picking the chain with the highest recorded…
In this paper, we identify a new form of attack, called the Balance attack, against proof-of-work blockchain systems. The novelty of this attack consists of delaying network communications between multiple subgroups of nodes with balanced…
Pool block withholding attack is performed among mining pools in digital cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Instead of mining honestly, pools can be incentivized to infiltrate their own miners into other pools. These infiltrators report…
It is an important decision-making problem for a miner in the blockchain networks if he/she participates in the mining so that he/she earns a reward by creating a new block earlier than other miners. We formulate this decision-making…
We introduce Auditable Proof-of-Work (APoW), a novel proof-of-work (PoW) construction inspired by Hashcash-style nonce searching, which enables the auditing of other miners' work through accountable re-scanning of the nonce space. The…
Popular distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems using proof-of-work (PoW) for Sybil attack resistance have extreme energy requirements, drawing stern criticism from academia, businesses, and the media. DLT systems building on…
Bitcoin's single leader consensus protocol (Nakamoto consensus) suffers from significant transaction throughput and network scalability issues due to the computational requirements of it Proof-of-Work (PoW) based leader selection strategy.…
Blockchain like Bitcoin and Ethereum suffer from scalability issues. Sharding is one of the most promising and leading solutions to scale blockchain. The basic idea behind sharding is to divide the blockchain network into multiple…
We analyze bribing attacks in Proof-of-Stake distributed ledgers from a game theoretic perspective. In bribing attacks, an adversary offers participants a reward in exchange for instructing them how to behave, with the goal of attacking the…
Blockchains are intended to be immutable, so an attacker who is able to delete transactions through a chain reorganization (a malicious reorg) can perform a profitable double-spend attack. We study the rate at which an attacker can execute…