Related papers: Pikachu: Securing PoS Blockchains from Long-Range …
We study an adversary who attacks a Proof-of-Work (POW) blockchain by selfishly constructing an alternative longest chain. We characterize optimal strategies employed by the adversary when a difficulty adjustment rule al\`a Bitcoin applies.…
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…
Owing to some special characteristics and features, blockchain is a very useful technique that can securely organize diverse devices in a smart city. It finds wide applications, especially in distributed environments, where entities such as…
As of July 15, 2023, Ethererum, which is a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain [1] has around 410 Billion USD in total assets on chain (popularly referred to as total-value-locked, TVL) but has only 33 Billion USD worth of ETH staked in…
This paper introduces BlockReduce, a Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchain system which achieves high transaction throughput through a hierarchy of merged mined blockchains, each operating in parallel on a partition the overall application…
The distributed consensus mechanism is the backbone of the rapidly developing blockchain network. Blockchain platforms consume vast amounts of electricity based on the current consensus mechanism of Proof of Work. Here, we point out an…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a Sybil control mechanism adopted in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. It prevents the attempt of malicious actors to manipulate distributed ledgers. Bitcoin has successfully suppressed double-spending by accepting…
Blockchain technology and, more generally, distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems, face public scrutiny for their energy consumption levels. However, many point out that high energy consumption is a feature of (small block size)…
We present the new mining protocol Proof-of-Reputation (PoR) for decentralized Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains, in particular for Bitcoin. PoR combines the classical PoW with the new ingredient of cryptographic reputation. The same level of…
Blockchain, the technology behind the popular Bitcoin, is considered a "security by design" system as it is meant to create security among a group of distrustful parties yet without a central trusted authority. The security of blockchain…
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain systems, especially those that allow stakeholders to organize themselves in ``stake-pools'', have emerged as a compelling paradigm for the deployment of large scale distributed ledgers. A stake-pool operates…
Blockchain as a promising technology is gaining its popularity ever since proof-of-work based Bitcoin came to the world. Nevertheless, Bitcoin achieves consensus at an expensive cost of energy. Proof-of-stake is one of the solutions for…
We present two attacks targeting the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) Ethereum consensus protocol. The first attack suggests a fundamental conceptual incompatibility between PoS and the Greedy Heaviest-Observed Sub-Tree (GHOST) fork choice paradigm…
Although proof of work (PoW) consensus dominates the current blockchain-based systems mostly, it has always been criticized for the uneconomic brute-force calculation. As alternatives, energy-conservation and energy-recycling mechanisms…
Blockchain has become a popular decentralized paradigm for various applications in the zero-trust environment. The core of the blockchain is the consensus protocol, which establishes consensus among all the participants. PoW (Proof-of-Work)…
Bitcoin blockchain uses hash-based Proof-of-Work (PoW) that prevents unwanted participants from hogging the network resources. Anyone entering the mining game has to prove that they have expended a specific amount of computational power.…
The protocol for cryptocurrencies can be divided into three parts, namely consensus, wallet, and networking overlay. The aim of the consensus part is to bring trustless rational peer-to-peer nodes to an agreement to the current status of…
Many blockchain systems today, including Bitcoin, rely on Proof of Work (PoW). Proof of work is crucial to the liveness and security of cryptocurrencies. The assumption when using PoW is that a lot of trial and error is required on average…
Blockchain stores information into a chain of "blocks", whose integrity is usually guaranteed by Proof of Work (PoW). In many blockchain applications (including cryptocurrencies), users compete with each other to win the ownership of the…
Proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency blockchains like Bitcoin secure vast amounts of money. Their operators, called miners, expend resources to generate blocks and receive monetary rewards for their effort. Blockchains are, in principle,…