Related papers: Proofs of Proof-of-Stake with Sublinear Complexity
Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, while central to achieving decentralized consensus, has long been criticized for excessive energy use and hardware inefficiencies \cite{devries2018bitcoin, truby2018decarbonizing}. This paper…
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…
In current blockchain systems, full nodes that perform all of the available functionalities need to store the entire blockchain. In addition to the blockchain, full nodes also store a blockchain-summary, called the \emph{state}, which is…
Ethereum has become a popular blockchain with smart contracts for investors nowadays. Due to the decentralization and anonymity of Ethereum, Ponzi schemes have been easily deployed and caused significant losses to investors. However, there…
Smart contract platforms facilitate the development of important and diverse distributed applications in a simple manner. This simplicity stems from the inherent utility of employing the state of smart contracts to store, query and verify…
With the rapid growth of hyperconnected devices and decentralized data architectures, safeguarding Internet of Things (IoT) transactions is becoming increasingly challenging. Blockchain presents a promising solution, yet its effectiveness…
The fundamental building blocks of the Bitcoin lightning network are bidirectional payment channels. We describe an extension of payment channels in the Proofgold network which allow the two parties to bet on whether a proposition will be…
The security and decentralization of Proof-of-Work (PoW) have been well-tested in existing blockchain systems. However, its tremendous energy waste has raised concerns about sustainability. Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW) aims to redirect the…
The performance of existing permissionless smart contract platforms such as Ethereum is limited by the consensus layer. Prism is a new proof-of-work consensus protocol that provably achieves throughput and latency up to physical limits…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
Permissionless consensus protocols require a scarce resource to regulate leader election and provide Sybil resistance. Existing paradigms such as Proof of Work and Proof of Stake instantiate this scarcity through parallelizable resources…
Blockchain protocols implement total-order broadcast in a permissionless setting, where processes can freely join and leave. In such a setting, to safeguard against Sybil attacks, correct processes rely on cryptographic proofs tied to a…
Light clients, also known as Simple Payment Verification (SPV) clients, are nodes which only download a small portion of the data in a blockchain, and use indirect means to verify that a given chain is valid. Typically, instead of…
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…
The beacon chain is the backbone of the Ethereum's evolution towards a proof-of-stake-based scalable network. Beacon clients are the applications implementing the services required to operate the beacon chain, namely validators, beacon…
We study the applicability of blockchain technology for distributed event detection under resource constraints. Therefore we provide a test-suite with several promising consensus methods (Proof-of-Work, Proof-of-Stake, Distributed…
This master thesis deals with Blockchain Technology in mobile turn based peer to peer games. First, it investigates the capabilities of Blockchain Technology to be used for gaming applications. In this regard, among others,…
With the advent of blockchain technologies, the idea of decentralized applications has gained traction. Smart contracts permit the implementation of application logic to foster distributed systems that are capable of removing…
This paper proposes a novel recursive polynomial commitment scheme (PCS) and a new polynomial interactive oracle proof (PIOP) protocol, which compile into efficient and transparent zk-SNARKs (zero-knowledge succinct non-interactive…
Formal verification of smart contracts has become a hot topic in academic and industrial research, given the growing value of assets managed by decentralized applications and the consequent incentive for adversaries to tamper with them.…