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We study the computation contests where players compete for searching a solution to a given problem with a winner-take-all reward. The search processes are independent across the players and the search speeds of players are proportional to…
The Bitcoin Lightning Network (LN) is designed to improve the scalability of blockchain systems by using off-chain payment paths to settle transactions in a faster, cheaper, and more private manner. This work aims to empirically study LN's…
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…
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…
Our aim is to determine conditions for quantum computing technology to give rise to security risks associated with quantum Bitcoin mining. Specifically, we determine the speed and energy efficiency a quantum computer needs to offer an…
In most popular public accessible cryptocurrency systems, the mining pool plays a key role because mining cryptocurrency with the mining pool turns the non-profitable situation into profitable for individual miners. In many recent novel…
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…
Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have long been criticized for their high computational and storage overhead. Unfortunately, while a number of proposals address the energy consumption of existing Proof-of-Work deployments, little…
We study the incentives behind double-spend attacks on Nakamoto-style Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies. In these systems, miners are allowed to choose which transactions to reference with their block, and a common strategy for selecting…
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…
Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed block…
Many blockchain systems today, including Bitcoin, rely on Proof of Work (PoW). Proof of work is crucial to the liveness and security of cryptocurrencies. The assumption when using PoW is that a lot of trial and error is required on average…
In Proof-of-Work blockchains, difficulty algorithms serve the crucial purpose of maintaining a stable transaction throughput by dynamically adjusting the block difficulty in response to the miners' constantly changing computational power.…
Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by miners to steal block rewards. In this paper, we explore a new form of selfish mining attack that guarantees high rewards with low cost. We show the feasibility of…
Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the world, supported by the immense hash power of its Proof-of-Work miners. Proof-of-Stake chains are energy-efficient, have fast finality but face several security issues: susceptibility to…
Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the world, supported by the immense hash power of its Proof-of-Work miners, but consumes huge amount of energy. Proof-of-Stake chains are energy-efficient, have fast finality and accountability, but…
Proof of Work (PoW) has extensively served as the foundation of blockchain's security, consistency, and tamper-resistance. However, long has it been criticized for its tremendous and inefficient utilization of computational power and…
We study a robust, i.e. in presence of malicious participants, multi-agent multi-armed bandit problem where multiple participants are distributed on a fully decentralized blockchain, with the possibility of some being malicious. The rewards…
Proof-of-stake (PoS) is a promising approach for designing efficient blockchains, where block proposers are randomly chosen with probability proportional to their stake. A primary concern with PoS systems is the "rich getting richer"…
Abrupt changes in the miner hash rate applied to a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain can adversely affect user experience and security. Because different PoW blockchains often share hashing algorithms, miners face a complex choice in deciding…