Related papers: Bitcoin Staking
In a Proof-of-Work blockchain such as Bitcoin mining hashrate is increasing in the block reward. An increase in hashrate reduces network vulnerability to attack (a reduction in security cost) while increasing carbon emissions and…
Since its advent in 2011, boson sampling has been a preferred candidate for demonstrating quantum advantage because of its simplicity and near-term requirements compared to other quantum algorithms. We propose to use a variant, called…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) systems face critical challenges, including excessive energy consumption and the centralization of mining power among entities with expensive hardware. Static mining pools exacerbate these issues by reducing competition…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
Trustless systems, such as those blockchain enpowered, provide trust in the system regardless of the trust of its participants, who may be honest or malicious. Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols and DAG-based approaches have emerged as a better…
Resource-based consensus is the backbone of permissionless distributed ledger systems. The security of such protocols relies fundamentally on the level of resources actively engaged in the system. The variety of different resources (and…
Bitcoin is a popular digital currency for online payments, realized as a decentralized peer-to-peer electronic cash system. Bitcoin keeps a ledger of all transactions; the majority of the participants decides on the correct ledger. Since…
Many blockchain-based decentralized services require their validators (operators) to deposit stake (collateral), which is forfeited (slashed) if they misbehave. Restaking networks let validators secure multiple services by reusing stake.…
One decade ago, Bitcoin was introduced, becoming the first cryptocurrency and establishing the concept of "blockchain" as a distributed ledger. As of today, there are many different implementations of cryptocurrencies working over a…
In September 2022, Ethereum transitioned from Proof-of-Work (PoW) to Proof-of-Stake (PoS) during "the merge" - making it the largest PoS cryptocurrency in terms of market capitalization. With this work, we present a comprehensive…
The comparative analysis examined eleven Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus-based blockchain networks to assess their openness based on five indicative metrics. These metrics include those of decentralization-related aspects, such as the number…
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)…
Since the inception of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have attracted an increasing interest from both academia and industry. Among various core components, consensus protocol is the defining technology…
Blokchain is a promising technology to enable distributed and reliable data sharing at the network edge. The high security in blockchain is undoubtedly a critical factor for the network to handle important data item. On the other hand,…
Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains are susceptible to adversarial majority mining attacks in the early stages due to incipient participation and corresponding low net hash power. Bootstrapping ensures safety and liveness during the transient…
We describe and analyze perishing mining, a novel block-withholding mining strategy that lures profit-driven miners away from doing useful work on the public chain by releasing block headers from a privately maintained chain. We then…
Blockchain Sharding is a blockchain performance enhancement approach. By splitting a blockchain into several parallel-run committees (shards), it helps increase transaction throughput, reduce computational resources required, and increase…
Blockchain technology has become almost as famous for incidents involving security breaches as for its innovative potential. We shed light on the prevalence and nature of these incidents through a database structured using the STIX format.…
Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus protocols often face a trade-off between performance and security. Protocols that pre-elect leaders for subsequent rounds are vulnerable to Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, which can disrupt the network and…
Stratum, the de-facto mining communication protocol used by blockchain based cryptocurrency systems, enables miners to reliably and efficiently fetch jobs from mining pool servers. In this paper we exploit Stratum's lack of encryption to…