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Blockchain is a technology that provides a distributed ledger that stores previous records while maintaining consistency and security. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized electronic cryptographic system that uses blockchain…
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…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. Attempts to address this challenge include layer-2 solutions, such as Bitcoin's Lightning or Ethereum's…
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer electronic payment system that has rapidly grown in popularity in recent years. Usually, the complete history of Bitcoin blockchain data must be queried to acquire variables with economic meaning. This task has…
Blockchain technology and, more generally, distributed ledger technology (DLT) systems, face public scrutiny for their energy consumption levels. However, many point out that high energy consumption is a feature of (small block size)…
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…
Blockchain plays a crucial role in ensuring the security and integrity of decentralized systems, with the proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism being fundamental for achieving distributed consensus. As PoW blockchains see broader adoption, an…
The proof-of-work consensus protocol suffers from two main limitations: waste of energy and offering only probabilistic guarantees about the status of the blockchain. This paper introduces SklCoin, a new Byzantine consensus protocol and its…
Most popular blockchain solutions, like Bitcoin, rely on proof-of-work, guaranteeing that the output of the consensus is agreed upon with high probability. However, this probability depends on the delivery of messages and that the…
In this paper we give an elementary analysis of economics of Bitcoin that combines the transaction demand by the consumers and the supply of hashrate by miners. We argue that the decreasing block reward will have no significant effect on…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains have emerged as a robust and effective consensus mechanism in open environments, leading to widespread deployment with numerous cryptocurrency platforms and substantial investments. However, the commonly…
The blockchain system has emerged as one of the focal points of research in recent years, particularly in applications and services such as cryptocurrencies and smart contracts. In this context, the hash value serves as a crucial element in…
Bitcoin derives a verifiable temporal order from probabilistic block discovery and cumulative proof-of-work rather than from a trusted global clock. We show that block arrivals exhibit stable exponential behavior across difficulty epochs,…
The enormous power consumption of Bitcoin has led to undifferentiated discussions in science and practice about the sustainability of blockchain and distributed ledger technology in general. However, blockchain technology is far from…
Blockchains use peer-to-peer networks for disseminating information among peers, but these networks currently do not have any provable guarantees for desirable properties such as Byzantine fault tolerance, good connectivity and small…
Heretofore the concept of "blockchain" has not been precisely defined. Accordingly the potential useful applications of this technology have been largely inflated. This work sidesteps the question of what constitutes a blockchain as such…
Sensor networks and Wireless Sensor Networks (WSN) are key components for the development of the Internet of Things. These networks are subject of two kinds of constraints. Adaptability by the mean of mutability and evolutivity, and…
In this paper, we review the undercutting attacks in the transaction-fee-based regime of proof-of-work (PoW) blockchains with the longest chain fork-choice rule. Next, we focus on the problem of fluctuations in mining revenue and the mining…
Mining processes of Bitcoin and similar cryptocurrencies are currently incentivized with voluntary transaction fees and fixed block rewards which will halve gradually to zero. In the setting where optional and arbitrary transaction fee…
Cryptocurrencies and blockchain networks have attracted tremendous attention from their volatile price movements and the promise of decentralization. However, most projects run on business narratives with no way to test and verify their…