Related papers: Block withholding resilience
Improving transaction throughput is an important challenge for Bitcoin. However, shortening the block generation interval or increasing the block size to improve throughput makes it sharing blocks within the network slower and increases the…
Proof of work blockchain protocols using multiple hash types are considered. It is proven that the security region of such a protocol cannot be the AND of a 51\% attack on all the hash types. Nevertheless, a protocol called Merged Bitcoin…
Mining attacks aim to gain an unfair share of extra rewards in the blockchain mining. Selfish mining can preserve discovered blocks and strategically release them, wasting honest miners' computing resources and getting higher profits.…
In recent years, cryptocurrencies have attracted growing attention from both private investors and institutions. Among them, Bitcoin stands out for its impressive volatility and widespread influence. This paper explores the predictability…
Blockchains use peer-to-peer networks for disseminating information among peers, but these networks currently do not have any provable guarantees for desirable properties such as Byzantine fault tolerance, good connectivity and small…
Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed block…
In the literature, strong coin tossing protocols based on bit commitment have been proposed. Here we examine a protocol that instead tries to achieve the task by sharing entanglement securely. The protocol uses only qubits, and has bias…
Proof-of-Stake consensus protocols give rise to complex modeling challenges. We analyze the recently-updated Tezos Proof-of-Stake protocol and demonstrate that, under certain conditions, rational participants are incentivized to behave…
We study to what extent the Bitcoin blockchain security permanently depends on the underlying distribution of cryptocurrency market outcomes. We use daily blockchain and Bitcoin data for 2014-2019 and employ the ARDL approach. We test three…
Low transaction throughput and poor scalability are significant issues in public blockchain consensus protocols such as Bitcoins. Recent research efforts in this direction have proposed shard-based consensus protocols where the key idea is…
In the area of blockchain, numerous methods have been proposed for suppressing intentional forks by attackers more effectively than the random rule. However, all of them, except for the random rule, require major updates, rely on a trusted…
Most of the Blockchain permissioned systems employ Byzantine fault-tolerance (BFT) consensus protocols to ensure that honest validators agree on the order for appending entries to their ledgers. In this paper, we study the performance and…
We argue that the current POW based consensus algorithm of the Bitcoin network suffers from a fundamental economic discrepancy between the real world transaction (txn) costs incurred by miners and the wealth that is being transacted. Put…
This paper develops a model to evaluate the viability of blockchain markets as the sole venue for price formation. Blockchains clear at discrete intervals called block time, and transactions are executed sequentially according to priority…
Digital money can be implemented efficiently by avoiding consensus. However, no-consensus implementations have drawbacks, as they cannot support smart contracts, and (even more fundamentally) they cannot deal with conflicting transactions.…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies secure a decentralized consensus protocol by incentives. The protocol participants, called miners, generate (mine) a series of blocks, each containing monetary transactions created by system users. As…
A blockchain faces two fundamental challenges. It must motivate users to maintain the system while preventing a minority of these users from colluding and gaining disproportionate control. Many popular public blockchains use monetary…
Orphan transactions are those whose parental income-sources are missing at the time that they are processed. These transactions are not propagated to other nodes until all of their missing parents are received, and they thus end up…
Bitcoin's security relies on its Proof-of-Work consensus, where miners solve puzzles to propose blocks. The puzzle's difficulty is set by the difficulty adjustment mechanism (DAM), based on the network's available mining power. Attacks that…
We make several contributions that quantify the real-time hash rate and therefore the consensus of a blockchain. We show that by using only the hash value of blocks, we can estimate and measure the hash rate of all miners or individual…