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Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
A soft control of the network activity through varying reward in a proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency is reported. Rewards are the necessity to incent the contributors activities (i.e., mining) in order to maintain the PoW network. Contrary…
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…
Proof-of-work blockchains reward each miner for one completed block by an amount that is, in expectation, proportional to the number of hashes the miner contributed to the mining of the block. Is this proportional allocation rule optimal?…
Does the proof-of-work protocol serve its intended purpose of supporting decentralized cryptocurrency mining? To address this question, we develop a game-theoretical model where miners first invest in hardware to improve the efficiency of…
Bitcoin mining presents a significant economic incentive for efficient hashing and broadcast of data, both parameters stemming from the Proofs of Work used to advance the network. This incentive has led to the development of Bitcoin…
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…
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…
We study the strategic considerations of miners participating in the bitcoin's protocol. We formulate and study the stochastic game that underlies these strategic considerations. The miners collectively build a tree of blocks, and they are…
Blockchain is a technology that provides a distributed ledger that stores previous records while maintaining consistency and security. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized electronic cryptographic system that uses blockchain…
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…
Bitcoin mining is a wasteful and resource-intensive process. To add a block of transactions to the blockchain, miners spend a considerable amount of energy. The Bitcoin protocol, named 'proof of work' (PoW), resembles a lottery and the…
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.…
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…
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…
In a Proof-of-Work blockchain such as Bitcoin mining hashrate is increasing in the block reward. An increase in hashrate reduces network vulnerability to attack (a reduction in security cost) while increasing carbon emissions and…
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…
Blockchain systems often employ proof-of-work consensus protocols to validate and add transactions into hashchains. These protocols stimulate competition among miners in solving cryptopuzzles (e.g. SHA-256 hash computation in Bitcoin) in…
This paper studies to what extent the cost of operating a proof-of-work blockchain is intrinsically linked to the cost of preventing attacks, and to what extent the underlying digital ledger security budgets are correlated with the…