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We study the strategic considerations of miners participating in the bitcoin's protocol. We formulate and study the stochastic game that underlies these strategic considerations. The miners collectively build a tree of blocks, and they are…
It has been known for some time that the Nakamoto consensus as implemented in the Bitcoin protocol is not totally aligned with the individual interests of the participants. More precisely, it has been shown that block withholding mining…
In Aug. 2017, Bitcoin was split into the original Bitcoin (BTC) and Bitcoin Cash (BCH). Since then, miners have had a choice between BTC and BCH mining because they have compatible proof-of-work algorithms. Therefore, they can freely choose…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology to maintain transactions order and provides probabilistic guarantee to prevent double-spending, assuming that an attacker's computational power does not exceed %50 of the network power. In this paper, we…
Several emerging PoW blockchain protocols rely on a "parallel-chain" architecture for scaling, where instead of a single chain, multiple chains are run in parallel and aggregated. A key requirement of practical PoW blockchains is to adapt…
We analyze Bitcoin mining from the perspective of a game and propose an optimal mining model that maximizes profits of pools and miners. The model is a two-stage Stackelberg game in which each stage forms a sub-game. In stage I, pools are…
In Proof-of-Work blockchains, difficulty algorithms serve the crucial purpose of maintaining a stable transaction throughput by dynamically adjusting the block difficulty in response to the miners' constantly changing computational power.…
An open distributed system can be secured by requiring participants to present proof of work and rewarding them for participation. The Bitcoin digital currency introduced this mechanism, which is adopted by almost all contemporary digital…
We study the strategic implications that arise from adding one extra option to the miners participating in the bitcoin protocol. We propose that when adding a block, miners also have the ability to pay forward an amount to be collected by…
What happens to mining when the Bitcoin price changes, when there are mining supply shocks, the price of energy changes, or hardware technology evolves? We give precise answers based on the technical forces and incentives in the system. We…
We study selfish mining in Ethereum. The problem is combinatorially more complex than in Bitcoin because of major differences in the reward system and a different difficulty adjustment formula. Equivalent strategies in Bitcoin do have…
On the blockchain, NFT games have risen in popularity, spawning new types of digital assets. We present a simplified version of well-known NFT games, followed by a discussion of issues influencing the structure and stability of generic…
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…
BitCoin transactions are malleable in a sense that given a transaction an adversary can easily construct an equivalent transaction which has a different hash. This can pose a serious problem in some BitCoin distributed contracts in which…
Bitcoin-NG, a scalable blockchain protocol, divides each block into a key block and many micro blocks to effectively improve the transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG has a special incentive mechanism (i.e. splitting transaction fees…
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…
This paper integrates Austrian capital theory with repeated game theory to examine strategic miner behaviour under different institutional conditions in blockchain systems. It shows that when protocol rules are mutable, effective time…
Most current assessments use ex post proxies that miss uncertainty and fail to consistently capture the rapid change in bitcoin mining. We introduce a unified, ex ante statistical model that derives expected return, downside risk, and…
Mining is the important part of the blockchain used the proof of work (PoW) on its consensus, looking for the matching block through testing a number of hash calculations. In order to attract more hash computing power, the miner who finds…
This paper proposes a method of emulation of \verb|OP_RAND| opcode on Bitcoin through a trustless interactive game between transaction counterparties. The game result is probabilistic and doesn't allow any party to cheat, increasing their…