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The idea of security sharing goes back to Nakamoto's introduction of merge mining, a technique that enables Bitcoin miners to reuse their hash power to bootstrap and secure other Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. However, with the rise of…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2026-05-20 Xinshu Dong , Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos , Ertem Nusret Tas , David Tse , Robin Linus Woll , Lei Yang , Mingchao Yu

As distributed ledgers, blockchains run consensus protocols which trade capacity for consistency, especially in non-ideal networks with incomplete connectivity and erroneous links. Existing studies on the tradeoff between capacity and…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-06-29 Xu Wang , Wei Ni , Xuan Zha , Guangsheng Yu , Ren Ping Liu , Nektarios Georgalas , Andrew Reeves

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…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-01-28 Andrei Lihu , Jincheng Du , Igor Barjaktarevic , Patrick Gerzanics , Mark Harvilla

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2021-10-12 Qing Zhang , Xueping Gong , Huizhong Li , Hao Wu , Jiheng Zhang

Safety guarantees and security-latency problem of Nakamoto consensus have been extensively studied in the last decade with a bounded delay model. Recent studies have shown that PoW protocol is secure under random delay models as well. In…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-05-13 Mustafa Doger , Sennur Ulukus , Nail Akar

Decentralized systems built around blockchain technology promise clients an immutable ledger. They add a transaction to the ledger after it undergoes consensus among the replicas that run a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) or Byzantine Fault-Tolerant…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-08-08 Junchao Chen , Suyash Gupta , Alberto Sonnino , Lefteris Kokoris-Kogias , Mohammad Sadoghi

Popular distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems using proof-of-work (PoW) for Sybil attack resistance have extreme energy requirements, drawing stern criticism from academia, businesses, and the media. DLT systems building on…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2022-04-05 Moritz Platt , Johannes Sedlmeir , Daniel Platt , Paolo Tasca , Jiahua Xu , Nikhil Vadgama , Juan Ignacio Ibañez

This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain PoW consensus on how the existence of multiple misbehaving miners influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner (or attacker interchangeably)…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2023-04-04 Qianlan Bai , Yuedong Xu , Nianyi Liu , Xin Wang

Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains burn a lot of energy. Proof-of-work algorithms are expensive by design and often only serve to compute blockchains. In some sense, carbon-based and non-carbon based regional electric power is fungible. So the…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2024-04-09 Agron Gemajli , Shivam Patel , Phillip G. Bradford

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…

Quantum Physics · Physics 2024-10-01 Bolton Bailey , Or Sattath

Mining is a central operation of all proof-of-work (PoW) based cryptocurrencies. The vast majority of miners today participate in "mining pools" instead of "solo mining" in order to lower risk and achieve a more steady income. However, this…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2022-12-15 Panagiotis Chatzigiannis , Foteini Baldimtsi , Igor Griva , Jiasun Li

Simple closed-form upper and lower bounds are developed for the security of the Nakamoto consensus as a function of the confirmation depth, the honest and adversarial block mining rates, and an upper bound on the block propagation delay.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-08-30 Dongning Guo , Ling Ren

A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2014-05-23 Stephen L. Reed

Most cryptocurrencies rely on Proof-of-Work (PoW) "mining" for resistance to Sybil and double-spending attacks, as well as a mechanism for currency issuance. Hashcash PoW has successfully secured the Bitcoin network since its inception,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-02-04 Michael Dubrovsky , Marshall Ball , Bogdan Penkovsky

Bitcoin is a popular cryptocurrency that records alltransactions in a distributed append-only public ledger calledblockchain. The security of Bitcoin heavily relies on the incentive-compatible proof-of-work (PoW) based distributed consensus…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2018-06-05 Mauro Conti , Sandeep Kumar E , Chhagan Lal , Sushmita Ruj

Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a Sybil control mechanism adopted in blockchain-based cryptocurrencies. It prevents the attempt of malicious actors to manipulate distributed ledgers. Bitcoin has successfully suppressed double-spending by accepting…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-08-31 Suhyeon Lee , Donghwan Lee , Seungjoo Kim

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…

Computers and Society · Computer Science 2014-09-30 Joe Lao

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.…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Pierre-Olivier Goffard , Hansjoerg Albrecher , Jean-Pierre Fouque

In the PoS blockchain landscape, the challenge of achieving full decentralization is often hindered by a disproportionate concentration of staked tokens among a few validators. This study analyses this challenge by first formalizing…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-05-21 Shashank Motepalli , Hans-Arno Jacobsen

The exponential growth of the blockchain size has become a major contributing factor that hinders the decentralisation of blockchain and its potential implementations in data-heavy applications. In this paper, we propose segment blockchain,…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-01-22 Yibin Xu , Yangyu Huang