Related papers: Block withholding resilience
Bitcoin-NG is an extensible blockchain protocol based on the same trust model as Bitcoin. It divides each epoch into one Key-Block and multiple Micro-Blocks, effectively improving transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG adopts a special…
Traditional security models for Nakamoto-style blockchains assume instantaneous synchronization among malicious nodes, which overestimate adversarial coordination capability. We revisit these existing models and propose two more realistic…
We develop a dynamic model of the Bitcoin market where users set fees themselves and miners decide whether to operate and whom to validate based on those fees. Our analysis reveals how, in equilibrium, users adjust their bids in response to…
We present three very simple variants of the classic Heads or Tails game using chips, each of which contributes to our understanding of the Bitcoin protocol. The first variant addresses the issue of temporary Bitcoin forks, which occur when…
Nakamoto consensus, the protocol underlying Bitcoin, has the potential to secure a new class of systems which agree on non-mathematical truths. As an example of this capability, we propose a design for a trustless, data availability oracle.…
We investigate the time to consensus in Nakamoto blockchains. Specifically, we consider two competing growth processes, labeled \emph{honest} and \emph{adversarial}, and determine the time after which the honest process permananetly exceeds…
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that incentivizes…
Bitcoin's (BTC) Difficulty Adjustment Algorithm (DAA) has been a source of vulnerability for incentive attacks such as selfish mining, block withholding and coin hopping strategies. In this paper, first, we rigorously study the short-term…
Proof-of-work blockchains reward each miner for one completed block by an amount that is, in expectation, proportional to the number of hashes the miner contributed to the mining of the block. Is this proportional allocation rule optimal?…
Bitcoin was recently introduced as a peer-to-peer electronic currency in order to facilitate transactions outside the traditional financial system. The core of Bitcoin, the Blockchain, is the history of the transactions in the system…
Cryptocurrency achieves distributed consensus using proof of work (PoW). Prior research in blockchain security identified financially incentivized attacks based on withholding blocks which have the attacker compromise a victim pool and pose…
We compute the revenue ratio of the Trail Stubborn mining strategy in the Bitcoin network and compare its profitability to other block-withholding strategies. We use for this martingale techniques and a classical analysis of the hiker…
In this paper we revisit the mining strategies in proof of work based cryptocurrencies and propose two strategies, we call smart and smarter mining, that in many cases strictly dominate honest mining. In contrast to other known attacks,…
The aim of this work is to enhance blockchain security by deepening the understanding of selfish mining attacks in various consensus protocols, especially the ones that have the potential to mitigate selfish mining. Previous research was…
In Proof-of-Work blockchains, difficulty algorithms serve the crucial purpose of maintaining a stable transaction throughput by dynamically adjusting the block difficulty in response to the miners' constantly changing computational power.…
Stubborn mining attack greatly downgrades Bitcoin throughput and also benefits malicious miners (attackers). This paper aims to quantify the impact of block receiving delay on stubborn mining attack severity in imperfect Bitcoin networks.…
We present a new Bitcoin coin selection algorithm, "coin selection with leverage", which aims to improve upon cost savings than that of standard knapsack like approaches. Parameters to the new algorithm are available to be tuned at the…
Formal analyses of blockchain protocols have received much attention recently. Consistency results of Nakamoto's blockchain protocol are often expressed in a quantity $c$, which denotes the expected number of network delays before some…
Most public blockchain protocols, including the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, do not formally specify the order in which miners should select transactions from the pool of pending (or uncommitted) transactions for inclusion in…
Blockchain systems often employ proof-of-work consensus protocols to validate and add transactions into hashchains. These protocols stimulate competition among miners in solving cryptopuzzles (e.g. SHA-256 hash computation in Bitcoin) in…