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Over the past five years, the rewards associated with mining Proof-of-Work blockchains have increased substantially. As a result, miners are heavily incentivized to design and utilize Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that…
Recent advances in the cryptographic field of "Zero-Knowledge Proofs" have sparked a new wave of research, giving birth to many exciting theoretical approaches in the last few years. Such research has often overlapped with the need for…
Cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin are realized using distributed systems and hence critically rely on the performance and security of the interconnecting network. The requirements on these networks and their usage, however can differ…
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),…
Hyperdimensional Computing (HDC) is a promising bio-inspired learning paradigm for its advantage of balancing performance and efficiency and has been increasingly applied to the bio-medical domain. In bio-medical applications,…
Blockchain technology is a breakthrough in changing the ways of business and organization operations, in which the consensus problem is challenging with practical constraints, such as computational power and consensus standard. In this…
Blockchain, the technology behind the popular Bitcoin, is considered a "security by design" system as it is meant to create security among a group of distrustful parties yet without a central trusted authority. The security of blockchain…
Today's world is organized based on merit and value. A single global currency that's decentralized is needed for a global economy. Bitcoin is a partial solution to this need, however it suffers from scalability problems which prevent it…
A principal vulnerability of a proof-of-work ("PoW") blockchain is that an attacker can re-write the history of transactions by forking a previously published block and build a new chain segment containing a different sequence of…
Proof of Work (PoW) is a Sybil-deterrence security mechanism. It introduces an external cost to a system by requiring computational effort to perform actions. However, since its inception, a central challenge was to tune this cost. Initial…
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…
In a previous paper, it was discussed whether Bitcoin and/or its blockchain could be considered a complex system and, if so, whether a chaotic one, a positive response raising concerns about the likelihood of Bitcoin/blockchain entering a…
Blockchain is a radical innovation with a unique value proposition that shifts trust from institutions to algorithms. Still, the potential of blockchains remains elusive due to knowledge gaps between computer science research and…
Formalization of mathematics is the process of digitizing mathematical knowledge, which allows for formal proof verification as well as efficient semantic searches. Given the large and ever-increasing gap between the set of formalized and…
Blockchain technology emerged with the advent of Bitcoin and rapidly developed over the past few decades, becoming widely accepted and known by the public. However, in the past decades, the massive adoption of blockchain technology has yet…
The energy sustainability of blockchains, whose consensus protocol rests on the Proof-of-Work, nourishes a heated debate. The underlying issue lies in a highly energy-consuming process, defined as mining, required to validate crypto-asset…
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 significant computational work in…
Digital societies increasingly rely on trustworthy proofs of physical presence for services such as supply-chain tracking, e-voting, ride-sharing, and location-based rewards. Yet, traditional localization methods often lack cryptographic…
We propose a refinement to the well known, and widely used, proof-of-work scheme of zeroing a cryptographic hash. Our refinement allows multiple autonomous users to cooperate on the proof-of-work for their own transactions in order to bring…
Cryptocurrencies have garnered much attention in recent years, both from the academic community and industry. One interesting aspect of cryptocurrencies is their explicit consideration of incentives at the protocol level. Understanding how…