Related papers: Bitcoin's Latency--Security Analysis Made Simple
We review the so called selfish mining strategy in the Bitcoin network and compare its profitability to honest mining.We build a rigorous profitability model for repetition games. The time analysis of the attack has been ignored in the…
In recent years, significant research efforts have focused on improving blockchain throughput and confirmation speeds without compromising security. While decreasing the time it takes for a transaction to be included in the blockchain…
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…
A blockchain is an append-only linked-list of blocks, which is maintained at each participating node. Each block records a set of transactions and their associated metadata. Blockchain transactions act on the identical ledger data stored at…
This paper introduces a structural game-theoretic model to value decentralized digital assets like Bitcoin. Instead of relying on speculative beliefs, it frames the asset's price within a Rational-Expectations Security-Utility Nash…
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…
Mining processes of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are currently incentivized with voluntary transaction fees and fixed block rewards which will halve gradually to zero. In the setting where optional and arbitrary transaction fee…
The Bitcoin protocol allows to save arbitrary data on the blockchain through a special instruction of the scripting language, called OP_RETURN. A growing number of protocols exploit this feature to extend the range of applications of the…
This paper presents TetraBFT, a novel unauthenticated Byzantine fault tolerant protocol for solving consensus in partial synchrony, eliminating the need for public key cryptography and ensuring resilience against computationally unbounded…
This paper presents a stochastic model for block arrival times based on the difficulty retargeting rule used in Bitcoin, as well as other proof-of-work blockchains. Unlike some previous work, this paper explicitly models the difficulty…
Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the world, supported by the immense hash power of its Proof-of-Work miners. Proof-of-Stake chains are energy-efficient, have fast finality but face several security issues: susceptibility to…
Longest-chain blockchain protocols, such as Bitcoin, guarantee liveness even when the number of actively participating users is variable, i.e., they are adaptive. However, they are not safe under network partitions, i.e., they do not…
Despite broad use of BFT consensus in blockchains, censorship resistance is weak: leaders can exclude transactions, a growing concern for trading and DeFi. We address this by introducing a new abstraction and protocol stack. First, we…
Bitcoin-NG, a scalable blockchain protocol, divides each block into a key block and many micro blocks to effectively improve the transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG has a special incentive mechanism (i.e. splitting transaction fees…
The mystery about the ingenious creator of Bitcoin concealing behind the pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto has been fascinating the global public for more than a decade. Suddenly jumping out of the dark in 2008, this persona hurled the…
Bitcoin is a digital currency which relies on a distributed set of miners to mint coins and on a peer-to-peer network to broadcast transactions. The identities of Bitcoin users are hidden behind pseudonyms (public keys) which are…
This study examines the weak form of the efficient market hypothesis for Bitcoin using a feedforward neural network. Due to the increasing popularity of cryptocurrencies in recent years, the question has arisen, as to whether market…
It is a common belief that Byzantine fault-tolerant solutions for consensus are significantly slower than their crash fault-tolerant counterparts. Indeed, in PBFT, the most widely known Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocol, it takes…
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…
In this paper we revisit some major orthodoxies which lie at the heart of the bitcoin crypto currency and its numerous clones. In particular we look at The Longest Chain Rule, the monetary supply policies and the exact mechanisms which…