Related papers: Block withholding resilience
We describe and analyze perishing mining, a novel block-withholding mining strategy that lures profit-driven miners away from doing useful work on the public chain by releasing block headers from a privately maintained chain. We then…
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…
We analyze Bitcoin mining from the perspective of a game and propose an optimal mining model that maximizes profits of pools and miners. The model is a two-stage Stackelberg game in which each stage forms a sub-game. In stage I, pools are…
We analyze how secure a block is after the block becomes $k$-deep, i.e., security-latency, for Nakamoto consensus under an exponential network delay model. We provide the fault tolerance and extensive bounds on safety violation…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography which has recently gained excessive popularity. Scientific research on bitcoin is less abundant. A paper at Financial Cryptography 2012…
Proof-of-Work blockchain, despite its numerous benefits, is still not an entirely secure technology due to the existence of Selfish Mining (SM) strategies that can disrupt the system and its mining economy. While the effect of SM has been…
Nakamoto consensus are the most widely adopted decentralized consensus mechanism in cryptocurrency systems. Since it was proposed in 2008, many studies have focused on analyzing its security. Most of them focus on maximizing the profit of…
All public blockchains are secured by a proof of opportunity cost among block producers. For example, the security offered by proof-of-work (PoW) systems, like Bitcoin, is due to spent computation; it is work precisely because it cannot be…
Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks.…
We study a game-theoretic model of blockchain mining economies and show that griefing, a practice according to which participants harm other participants at some lesser cost to themselves, is a prevalent threat at its Nash equilibria. The…
TrueBit is a protocol that uses interactive verification to allow a resource-constrained computation environment like a blockchain to perform much larger computations than usual in a trusted way. As long as a single honest participant is…
Privacy was one of the key points mentioned in Nakamoto's Bitcoin whitepaper, and one of the selling points of Bitcoin in its early stages. In hindsight, however, de-anonymising Bitcoin users turned out to be more feasible than expected.…
What happens to mining when the Bitcoin price changes, when there are mining supply shocks, the price of energy changes, or hardware technology evolves? We give precise answers based on the technical forces and incentives in the system. We…
Recently, the blockchain technique was put in the spotlight as it introduced a systematic approach for multiple parties to reach consensus without needing trust. However, the application of this technique in practice is severely restricted…
Blockchain systems benefit from lessons in prior art such as fault tolerance, distributed systems, peer-to-peer systems, and game theory. In this paper we argue that blockchain algorithms should tolerate both rational (self-interested)…
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain PoW consensus on how the existence of multiple misbehaving miners influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner (or attacker interchangeably)…
In this paper, we represent the problem of selecting miners within a blockchain-based system as a subset selection problem. We formulate the problem of minimising blockchain energy consumption as an optimisation problem with two conflicting…
In cryptocurrencies, the block reward is meant to serve as the incentive mechanism for miners to commit resources to create blocks and in effect secure the system. Existing systems primarily divide the reward in proportion to expended…
Bitcoin is the first successful decentralized global digital cash system. Its mining process requires intense computational resources, therefore its usefulness remains a disputable topic. We aim to solve three problems with Bitcoin and…
In the high-stakes race to develop more scalable blockchains, some platforms (Binance, Cosmos, EOS, TRON, etc.) have adopted committee-based consensus (CBC) protocols, whereby the blockchain's record-keeping rights are entrusted to a…