Related papers: Block withholding resilience
Pool block withholding attack is performed among mining pools in digital cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin. Instead of mining honestly, pools can be incentivized to infiltrate their own miners into other pools. These infiltrators report…
Algorand is a recent, open-source public or permissionless blockchain system that employs a novel proof-of-stake byzantine consensus protocol to efficiently scale the distributed transaction agreement problem to billions of users. In…
Optimistic responsiveness -- the ability of a consensus protocol to operate at the speed of the network -- is widely used in consensus protocol design to optimize latency and throughput. However, blockchain applications incentivize…
We study game-theoretic models for capturing participation in blockchain systems. Permissionless blockchains can be naturally viewed as games, where a set of potentially interested users is faced with the dilemma of whether to engage with…
In a PoW-based blockchain network, mining pools (the solo miner could be regarded as a mining pool containing one miner) compete to successfully mine blocks to pursue rewards. Generally, the rewards include the fixed block subsidies and…
Distributed ledger systems, such as blockchains, rely on consensus protocols that commit ordered messages for processing. In practice, message ordering within these systems is often reward-driven. This raises concerns about fairness,…
The idea of security sharing goes back to Nakamoto's introduction of merge mining, a technique that enables Bitcoin miners to reuse their hash power to bootstrap and secure other Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. However, with the rise of…
A new variation of blockchain proof of work algorithm is proposed to incentivize the timely execution of image processing algorithms. A sample image processing algorithm is proposed to determine interesting images using analysis of the…
Mining fairness in blockchain refers to equality between the computational resources invested in mining and the block rewards received. There exists a dilemma wherein increasing the transaction processing capacity of a blockchain…
Mining blocks in a blockchain using the \textit{Proof-of-Work} consensus protocol involves significant risk, as network participants face continuous operational costs while earning infrequent capital gains upon successfully mining a block.…
Bitcoin is a representative decentralized currency system. For the security of Bitcoin, fairness in the distribution of mining rewards plays a crucial role in preventing the concentration of computational power in a few miners. Here,…
Financial fraud cases are on the rise even with the current technological advancements. Due to the lack of inter-organization synergy and because of privacy concerns, authentic financial transaction data is rarely available. On the other…
We formulate the design of a threshold signature scheme as made possible on cryptocurrency protocols like Bitcoin. The funds are secured by an m-of-n threshold signature, where at least m signatures are needed to unlock the funds. A user…
Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the current state. If an enhanced majority of staking nodes, also called validators, agree on a proposed block, then this block is appended to the blockchain.…
We model and analyze blockchain miners who seek to maximize the compound return of their mining businesses. The analysis of the optimal strategies finds a new equilibrium point among the miners and the mining pools, which predicts the…
Despite the tremendous interest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum today, many aspects of the underlying consensus protocols are poorly understood. Therefore, the search for protocols that improve either throughput or security…
Initiated from Nakamoto's Bitcoin system, blockchain technology has demonstrated great capability of building secure consensus among decentralized parties at Internet-scale, i.e., without relying on any centralized trusted party. Nowadays,…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…
The energy sustainability of blockchains, whose consensus protocol rests on the Proof-of-Work, nourishes a heated debate. The underlying issue lies in a highly energy-consuming process, defined as mining, required to validate crypto-asset…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…