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In the past decades, the blockchain technology has attracted tremendous attention from both academia and industry. The popularity of blockchain networks was originated from a crypto-currency to serve as a decentralized and tamperproof…
Many protocols in distributed computing rely on a source of randomness, usually called a random beacon, both for their applicability and security. This is especially true for proof-of-stake blockchain protocols in which the next miner or…
Censorship resilience is a fundamental assumption underlying the security of blockchain protocols. Additionally, the analysis of blockchain security from an economic and game theoretic perspective has been growing in popularity in recent…
Regardless of their variations, blockchains require a consensus mechanism to validate transactions, supervise added blocks, maintain network security, synchronize the network state, and distribute incentives. Proof-of-Work (PoW), one of the…
The security of blockchain systems depends on the distribution of mining power across participants. If sufficient mining power is controlled by one entity, they can force their own version of events. This may allow them to double spend…
Blockchain applications that rely on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) have increasingly become energy inefficient with a staggering carbon footprint. In contrast, energy-efficient alternative consensus protocols such as Proof-of-Stake (PoS) may…
This paper investigates the fundamental trade-offs between block safety, confirmation latency, and transaction throughput of proof-of-work (PoW) longest-chain fork-choice protocols, also known as PoW Nakamoto consensus. New upper and lower…
Crypto-currencies are digital assets designed to work as a medium of exchange, e.g., Bitcoin, but they are susceptible to attacks (dishonest behavior of participants). A framework for the analysis of attacks in crypto-currencies requires…
We describe a prototype of a fully capable Ethereum Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchain network running on multiple Raspberry Pi (RPi) computers. The prototype is easy to set up and is intended to function as a completely standalone system,…
Blockchain technology has developed significantly over the last decade. One of the reasons for this is its sustainability architecture, which does not allow modification of the history of committed transactions. That means that developers…
The blockchain data structure maintained via the longest-chain rule---popularized by Bitcoin---is a powerful algorithmic tool for consensus algorithms. Such algorithms achieve consistency for blocks in the chain as a function of their depth…
Layer 1 (L1) blockchains such as Ethereum are secured under an "honest supermajority of stake" assumption for a large pool of validators who verify each and every transaction on it. This high security comes at a scalability cost which not…
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.…
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…
The security of most existing cryptocurrencies is based on a concept called Proof-of-Work, in which users must solve a computationally hard cryptopuzzle to authorize transactions (`one unit of computation, one vote'). This leads to enormous…
We lay the foundations for a blockchain scheme, whose consensus is reached via a proof of work algorithm based on the solution of consecutive discrete logarithm problems over the point group of elliptic curves. In the considered…
The Decentralized-Consistent-Scale (DCS) Triangle defines three dimensions that illustrate the tradeoffs of the blockchain consensus mechanism. In this paper, we propose a new hybrid consensus protocol, called Deterministic Proof of Work…
The Nakamoto longest chain protocol is remarkably simple and has been proven to provide security against any adversary with less than 50% of the total hashing power. Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are an energy efficient alternative;…
Popular distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems using proof-of-work (PoW) for Sybil attack resistance have extreme energy requirements, drawing stern criticism from academia, businesses, and the media. DLT systems building on…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus is traditionally analyzed under the assumption that all miners incur similar costs per unit of computational effort. In reality, costs vary due to factors such as regional electricity cost differences and…