Related papers: Crystal: Enhancing Blockchain Mining Transparency …
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…
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that incentivizes…
Existing permissioned blockchain systems designate a fixed and explicit group of committee nodes to run a consensus protocol that confirms the same sequence of blocks among all nodes. Unfortunately, when such a permissioned blockchain runs…
Blockchains based on the celebrated Nakamoto consensus protocol have shown promise in several applications, including cryptocurrencies. However, these blockchains have inherent scalability limits caused by the protocol's consensus…
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…
This paper outlines a method aiming to increase the efficiency of proof-of-work based blockchains using a ticket-based approach. To avoid the limitation of serially adding one block at a time to a blockchain, multiple semi-independent…
The steady advancement in quantum computer error correction technology has pushed the current record to 48 stable logical qubits, bringing us closer to machines capable of running Shor's algorithm at scales that threaten RSA and ECC…
Tendermint-core blockchains (e.g. Cosmos) are considered today one of the most viable alternatives for the highly energy consuming proof-of-work blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Their particularity is that they aim at offering…
Since the invention of Bitcoin one decade ago, numerous cryptocurrencies have sprung into existence. Among these, proof-of-work is the most common mechanism for achieving consensus, whilst a number of coins have adopted "ASIC-resistance" as…
Blockchains add transactions to a distributed shared ledger by arriving at consensus on sets of transactions contained in blocks. This provides a total ordering on a set of global transactions. However, total ordering is not enough to…
As an emerging service framework built by combining cryptography, P2P network, consensus mechanism and innovative contract technology, blockchain has been widely used in digital finance, data sharing, message traceability and electronic…
All public blockchains are secured by a proof of opportunity cost among block producers. For example, the security offered by proof-of-work (PoW) systems, like Bitcoin, is due to spent computation; it is work precisely because it cannot be…
Blockchains rely on a consensus among participants to achieve decentralization and security. However, reaching consensus in an online, digital world where identities are not tied to physical users is a challenging problem. Proof-of-work…
Cryptocurrencies are poised to revolutionize the modern economy by democratizing commerce. These currencies operate on top of blockchain-based distributed ledgers. Existing permissionless blockchain-based protocols offer unparalleled…
Despite the tremendous interest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum today, many aspects of the underlying consensus protocols are poorly understood. Therefore, the search for protocols that improve either throughput or security…
Mining attacks aim to gain an unfair share of extra rewards in the blockchain mining. Selfish mining can preserve discovered blocks and strategically release them, wasting honest miners' computing resources and getting higher profits.…
Threshold cryptography is essential for many blockchain protocols. For example, many protocols rely on threshold common coin to implement asynchronous consensus, leader elections, and provide support for randomized applications. Similarly,…
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…
Permissionless blockchain technology offers numerous potential benefits for decentralised applications, such as security, transparency, and openness. BFT-based consensus mechanisms are widely adopted in the permissioned blockchain to meet…
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…