Related papers: DECENT-BRM: Decentralization through Block Reward …
Although Bitcoin was intended to be a decentralized digital currency, in practice, mining power is quite concentrated. This fact is a persistent source of concern for the Bitcoin community. We provide an explanation using a simple model to…
Current blockchain consensus protocols -- notably, Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) -- deliver global agreement but exhibit structural constraints. PoW anchors security in heavy computation, inflating energy use and imposing…
We study long-term equilibria that arise in the token monetary policy, or tokenomics, design of proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain systems that engage utility maximizing users and validators. Validators are system maintainers who get rewarded…
The distributed consensus mechanism is the backbone of the rapidly developing blockchain network. Blockchain platforms consume vast amounts of electricity based on the current consensus mechanism of Proof of Work. Here, we point out an…
Cooperation is fundamental for human prosperity. Blockchain, as a trust machine, is a cooperative institution in cyberspace that supports cooperation through distributed trust with consensus protocols. While studies in computer science…
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?…
We propose a blockchain architecture in which mining requires a quantum computer. The consensus mechanism is based on proof of quantum work, a quantum-enhanced alternative to traditional proof of work that leverages quantum supremacy to…
Blockchain protocols differ in fundamental ways, including the mechanics of selecting users to produce blocks (e.g., proof-of-work vs. proof-of-stake) and the method to establish consensus (e.g., longest chain rules vs. Byzantine…
In today's connected world, resource constrained devices are deployed for sensing and decision making applications, ranging from smart cities to environmental monitoring. Those recourse constrained devices are connected to create real-time…
Security analysis of blockchain technology is an active domain of research. There has been both cryptographic and game-theoretic security analysis of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. Prominent work includes the cryptographic security…
Proof-of-work (PoW) is an algorithmic tool used to secure networks by imposing a computational cost on participating devices. Unfortunately, traditional PoW schemes require that correct devices perform computational work perpetually, even…
Blockchain is a novel technology that is rising a lot of interest in the industrial and re- search sectors because its properties of decentralisation, immutability and data integrity. Initially, the underlying consensus mechanism has been…
Although the decentralized storage technology based on the blockchain can effectively realize secure data storage on cloud services. However, there are still some problems in the existing schemes, such as low storage capacity and low…
Bitcoin is a representative decentralized currency system. For the security of Bitcoin, fairness in the distribution of mining rewards plays a crucial role in preventing the concentration of computational power in a few miners. Here,…
Proof-of-stake blockchain protocols have emerged as a compelling paradigm for organizing distributed ledger systems. In proof-of-stake (PoS), a subset of stakeholders participate in validating a growing ledger of transactions. For the…
Blockchain is an essentially distributed database recording all transactions or digital events among participating parties. Each transaction in the records is approved and verified by consensus of the participants in the system that…
Decentralisation is one of the promises introduced by blockchain technologies: fair and secure interaction amongst peers with no dominant positions, single points of failure or censorship. Decentralisation, however, appears difficult to be…
We present a design called Proof of Gradient Optimization (PoGO) for blockchain consensus, where miners produce verifiable evidence of training large-scale machine-learning models. Building on previous work, we incorporate quantized…
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…
We analyze the economic incentives generated by the proof-of-stake mechanism discussed in the Ethereum Casper upgrade proposal. Compared with proof-of-work, proof-of-stake has a different cost structure for attackers. In Budish (2018),…