Related papers: Measuring Miner Decentralization in Proof-of-Work …
Does the proof-of-work protocol serve its intended purpose of supporting decentralized cryptocurrency mining? To address this question, we develop a game-theoretical model where miners first invest in hardware to improve the efficiency of…
Bitcoin mining presents a significant economic incentive for efficient hashing and broadcast of data, both parameters stemming from the Proofs of Work used to advance the network. This incentive has led to the development of Bitcoin…
More than ten years ago the blockchain was acclaimed as the solution to overcome centralised trusted third parties for online payments. Through the years the crypto-movement changed and evolved, although decentralisation remained the core…
Blockchain technology relies on decentralization to resist faults and attacks while operating without trusted intermediaries. Although industry experts have touted decentralization as central to their promise and disruptive potential, it is…
Blockchain technology promises to democratize finance and promote social equity through decentralization, but questions remain about whether current implementations advance or hinder these goals. Through a mixed-methods study combining…
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…
One decade ago, Bitcoin was introduced, becoming the first cryptocurrency and establishing the concept of "blockchain" as a distributed ledger. As of today, there are many different implementations of cryptocurrencies working over a…
In the context of blockchain systems, the importance of decentralization is undermined by the lack of a widely accepted methodology to measure it. To address this gap, we set out a systematization effort targeting the decentralization…
Since its advent in 2009, Bitcoin, a cryptography-enabled peer-to-peer digital payment system, has been gaining increasing attention from both academia and industry. An effort designed to overcome a cluster of bottlenecks inherent in…
Today's world is organized based on merit and value. A single global currency that's decentralized is needed for a global economy. Bitcoin is a partial solution to this need, however it suffers from scalability problems which prevent it…
We study decentralized cryptocurrency protocols in which the participants do not deplete physical scarce resources. Such protocols commonly rely on Proof of Stake, i.e., on mechanisms that extend voting power to the stakeholders of the…
Although Bitcoin was intended to be a decentralized digital currency, in practice, mining power is quite concentrated. This fact is a persistent source of concern for the Bitcoin community. We provide an explanation using a simple model to…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
Cryptocurrencies have gained popularity due to their transparency, security, and accessibility compared to traditional financial systems, with Bitcoin, introduced in 2009, leading the market. Bitcoin's security relies on blockchain…
We study efficiency in a proof-of-work blockchain with non-zero latencies, focusing in particular on the (inequality in) individual miners' efficiencies. Prior work attributed differences in miners' efficiencies mostly to attacks, but we…
Blockchains revolutionized centralized sectors like banking and finance by promoting decentralization and transparency. In a blockchain, information is transmitted through transactions issued by participants or applications. Miners…
It is widely accepted that Ethereum mining is highly centralized. Nonetheless, centralization has been mostly characterized by exclusively looking at the influence that independent miners or mining pools can have over the network. Moreover,…
Mining fairness in blockchain refers to equality between the computational resources invested in mining and the block rewards received. There exists a dilemma wherein increasing the transaction processing capacity of a blockchain…
We propose DIPS Difficulty-based Incentives for Problem Solving), a simple modification of the Bitcoin proof-of-work algorithm that rewards blockchain miners for solving optimization problems of scientific interest. The result is a…
Proof-of-Work blockchain, despite its numerous benefits, is still not an entirely secure technology due to the existence of Selfish Mining (SM) strategies that can disrupt the system and its mining economy. While the effect of SM has been…