Related papers: Majority is not Needed: A Counterstrategy to Selfi…
The consensus protocol named proof of work (PoW) is widely applied by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Although security of a PoW cryptocurrency is always the top priority, it is threatened by mining attacks like selfish mining. Researchers…
Mining is a central operation of all proof-of-work (PoW) based cryptocurrencies. The vast majority of miners today participate in "mining pools" instead of "solo mining" in order to lower risk and achieve a more steady income. However, this…
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…
In the Bitcoin system, participants are rewarded for solving cryptographic puzzles. In order to receive more consistent rewards over time, some participants organize mining pools and split the rewards from the pool in proportion to each…
Illicit crypto-mining leverages resources stolen from victims to mine cryptocurrencies on behalf of criminals. While recent works have analyzed one side of this threat, i.e.: web-browser cryptojacking, only commercial reports have partially…
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…
We study selfish mining in Ethereum. The problem is combinatorially more complex than in Bitcoin because of major differences in the reward system and a different difficulty adjustment formula. Equivalent strategies in Bitcoin do have…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…
In this paper, we provide a novel dynamic decision method of blockchain selfish mining by applying the sensitivity-based optimization theory. Our aim is to find the optimal dynamic blockchain-pegged policy of the dishonest mining pool. To…
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…
Miners play a key role in cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin: they invest substantial computational resources in processing transactions and minting new currency units. It is well known that an attacker controlling more than half of the…
As the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and today's biggest decentralized platform that runs smart contracts, Ethereum has received much attention from both industry and academia. Nevertheless, there exist very few…
Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency, and an accompanying protocol, created in 2008. Bitcoin nodes continuously generate and propagate blocks---collections of newly approved transactions that are added to Bitcoin's ledger. Block…
The core of many cryptocurrencies is the decentralised validation network operating on proof-of-work technology. In these systems, validation is done by so-called miners who can digitally sign blocks once they solve a computationally-hard…
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…
Mining blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol is well-known to be resource-consuming. A miner bears the operational cost, mainly electricity consumption and IT gear, of mining, and is compensated by a…
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…
For a mining strategy we define the notion of "profit lag" as the minimum time it takes to be profitable after that moment. We compute closed forms for the profit lag and the revenue ratio for the strategies "selfish mining" and…
Our aim in this paper is to investigate the profitability of double-spending (DS) attacks that manipulate an a priori mined transaction in a blockchain. It was well understood that a successful DS attack is established when the proportion…
Corruptive majority attacks, in which mining power is distributed among miners and an attacker attempts to bribe a majority of miners into participation in a majority attack, pose a threat to blockchains. Budish bounded the cost of bribing…