Related papers: Generic Selfish Mining MDP for DAG Protocols

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…

Motivated by the wide adoption of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world personalized services, where users' sensitive and private information needs to be protected, we study regret minimization in finite-horizon Markov decision…

Cryptographic Self-Selection is a subroutine used to select a leader for modern proof-of-stake consensus protocols, such as Algorand. In cryptographic self-selection, each round $r$ has a seed $Q_r$. In round $r$, each account owner is…

We study regret minimization under privacy constraints in episodic inhomogeneous linear Markov Decision Processes (MDPs), motivated by the growing use of reinforcement learning (RL) in personalized decision-making systems that rely on…

We consider (stochastic) softmax policy gradient (PG) methods for bandits and tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs). While the PG objective is non-concave, recent research has used the objective's smoothness and gradient domination…

We study regret minimization in finite horizon tabular Markov decision processes (MDPs) under the constraints of differential privacy (DP). This is motivated by the widespread applications of reinforcement learning (RL) in real-world…

Trading through decentralized exchanges (DEXs) has become crucial in today's blockchain ecosystem, enabling users to swap tokens efficiently and automatically. However, the capacity of miners to strategically order transactions has led to…

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…

We consider a class of optimization problems over stochastic variables where the algorithm can learn information about the value of any variable through a series of costly steps; we model this information acquisition process as a Markov…

We compute and compare profitabilities of stubborn mining strategies that are variations of selfish mining. These are deviant mining strategies violating Bitcoin's network protocol rules. We apply the foundational set-up from our previous…

Conventional double-spending attack models ignore the revenue losses stemming from the orphan blocks. On the other hand, selfish mining literature usually ignores the chance of the attacker to double-spend at no-cost in each attack cycle.…

In the area of blockchain, numerous methods have been proposed for suppressing intentional forks by attackers more effectively than the random rule. However, all of them, except for the random rule, require major updates, rely on a trusted…

Mining in proof-of-work blockchains has become an expensive affair requiring specialized hardware capable of executing several megahashes per second at huge electricity costs. Miners earn a reward each time they mine a block within the…

Robust Markov decision processes (MDPs) provide a general framework to model decision problems where the system dynamics are changing or only partially known. Efficient methods for some \texttt{sa}-rectangular robust MDPs exist, using its…

Metaheuristic search strategies have proven their effectiveness against man-made solutions in various contexts. They are generally effective in local search area exploitation, and their overall performance is largely impacted by the balance…

Cryptographic Self-Selection is a paradigm employed by modern Proof-of-Stake consensus protocols to select a block-proposing "leader." Algorand [Chen and Micali, 2019] proposes a canonical protocol, and Ferreira et al. [2022] establish…

Differential privacy (DP) is a compelling privacy definition that explains the privacy-utility tradeoff via formal, provable guarantees. Inspired by recent progress toward general-purpose data release algorithms, we propose a private…

Differential privacy (DP) is widely employed to provide privacy protection for individuals by limiting information leakage from the aggregated data. Two well-known models of DP are the central model and the local model. The former requires…

Many of the recent works on the profitability of rogue mining strategies hinge on a parameter called $\gamma$ that measures the proportion of the honest network attracted by the attacker to mine on top of his fork. These works, see…

This study tackles the computational challenges of solving Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) for a restricted class of problems. It is motivated by the Last Revealer Attack (LRA), which undermines fairness in some Proof-of-Stake (PoS)…