Related papers: Block withholding resilience
We give a straightforward proof for the formula giving the long-term apparent hashrate of the Selfish Mining strategy in Bitcoin using only elementary probabilities and combinatorics, and more precisely, Dyck words. There is no need to…
The security of Bitcoin protocols is deeply dependent on the incentives provided to miners, which come from a combination of block rewards and transaction fees. As Bitcoin experiences more halving events, the protocol reward converges to…
The blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain record the amount of work W that went into creating them through proofs of work. When honest parties control a majority of the work, consensus is achieved by picking the chain with the highest recorded…
Mining in proof-of-work blockchains has become an expensive affair requiring specialized hardware capable of executing several megahashes per second at huge electricity costs. Miners earn a reward each time they mine a block within the…
We present a strategy for a single quantum miner with relatively low hashing power, with the same ramifications as a 51% attack. Bitcoin nodes consider the chain with the highest cumulative proof-of-work to be the valid chain. A quantum…
Strategic mining attacks, such as selfish mining, exploit blockchain consensus protocols by deviating from honest behavior to maximize rewards. Markov Decision Process (MDP) analysis faces scalability challenges in modern digital economics,…
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment system proposed by Nakamoto in 2008. Properties of the bitcoin backbone protocol have been investigated in some depth: the blockchain growth property quantifies the number of blocks added to the blockchain…
Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven…
Bitcoin and Ethereum are the top two blockchain-based cryptocurrencies whether from cryptocurrency market cap or popularity. However, they are vulnerable to selfish mining and stubborn mining due to that both of them adopt Proof-of-Work…
Mining for Bitcoins is a high-risk high-reward activity. Miners, seeking to reduce their variance and earn steadier rewards, collaborate in pooling strategies where they jointly mine for Bitcoins. Whenever some pool participant is…
This work applies reinforcement learning (RL) from the AI machine learning field to derive an optimal Bitcoin-like blockchain mining strategy without knowing the details of the blockchain network model. Previously, the most profitable…
We study the strategic implications that arise from adding one extra option to the miners participating in the bitcoin protocol. We propose that when adding a block, miners also have the ability to pay forward an amount to be collected by…
We compute and compare profitabilities of stubborn mining strategies that are variations of selfish mining. These are deviant mining strategies violating Bitcoin's network protocol rules. We apply the foundational set-up from our previous…
Tendermint-core blockchains (e.g. Cosmos) are considered today one of the most viable alternatives for the highly energy consuming proof-of-work blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Their particularity is that they aim at offering…
For Nakamoto's longest-chain consensus protocol, whose proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS) variants power major blockchains such as Bitcoin and Cardano, we revisit the classic problem of the security-performance tradeoff: Given a…
Committee-based blockchains are among the most popular alternatives of proof-of-work based blockchains, such as Bitcoin. They provide strong consistency (no fork) under classical assumptions, and avoid using energy-consuming mechanisms to…
Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency, has attracted a lot of attention from academia, financial service industry and enthusiasts. The trade-off between transaction confirmation throughput and centralization of hash power do not allow…
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…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies prioritize transactions based on their fees, creating a unique kind of fee market. Empirically, this market has failed to yield stable equilibria with predictable prices for desired levels of service. We…
BitCoin transactions are malleable in a sense that given a transaction an adversary can easily construct an equivalent transaction which has a different hash. This can pose a serious problem in some BitCoin distributed contracts in which…