Related papers: BM-PAW: A Profitable Mining Attack in the PoW-base…
A key component of security in decentralized blockchains is proof of opportunity cost among block producers. In the case of proof-of-work (PoW), currently used by the most prominent systems, the cost is due to spent computation. In this…
We study an adversary who attacks a Proof-of-Work (POW) blockchain by selfishly constructing an alternative longest chain. We characterize optimal strategies employed by the adversary when a difficulty adjustment rule al\`a Bitcoin applies.…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology and proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism where nodes spend computing resources and earn rewards in return for spending these resources. This incentive system has caused power to be significantly biased towards a…
Most PoW blockchain protocols operate with a simple mechanism whereby a threshold is set for each block and miners generate block hashes until one of those values falls below the threshold. Although largely effective, this mechanism…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular blockchain consensus algorithm that is used in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin in which hashing operations are repeated until the resulting hash has certain properties. This approach uses lots of computational…
The security of Bitcoin protocols is deeply dependent on the incentives provided to miners, which come from a combination of block rewards and transaction fees. As Bitcoin experiences more halving events, the protocol reward converges to…
Security analysis of blockchain technology is an active domain of research. There has been both cryptographic and game-theoretic security analysis of Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains. Prominent work includes the cryptographic security…
Proof-of-stake (PoS) is a promising approach for designing efficient blockchains, where block proposers are randomly chosen with probability proportional to their stake. A primary concern with PoS systems is the "rich getting richer"…
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain on how the existence of multiple misbehaving pools influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner maintains a private chain and makes it…
Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency, and an accompanying protocol, created in 2008. Bitcoin nodes continuously generate and propagate blocks---collections of newly approved transactions that are added to Bitcoin's ledger. Block…
Parallel Proof-of-Work (PoW) protocols have been suggested in the literature to improve the safety guarantees, transaction throughput and confirmation latencies of Nakamoto consensus. In this work, we first consider the existing parallel…
Proof-of-Stake blockchains based on a longest-chain consensus protocol are an attractive energy-friendly alternative to the Proof-of-Work paradigm. However, formal barriers to "getting the incentives right" were recently discovered, driven…
Owing to some special characteristics and features, blockchain is a very useful technique that can securely organize diverse devices in a smart city. It finds wide applications, especially in distributed environments, where entities such as…
Cryptocurrencies that are based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) often rely on special purpose hardware to perform so-called mining operations that secure the system, with miners receiving freshly minted tokens as a reward for their work. A notable…
Due to its minimal energy requirement the PoS consensus protocol has become an attractive alternative to PoW in modern cryptocurrencies. In this protocol the chance of being selected as a block proposer in each round is proportional to the…
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…
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…
Abrupt changes in the miner hash rate applied to a proof-of-work (PoW) blockchain can adversely affect user experience and security. Because different PoW blockchains often share hashing algorithms, miners face a complex choice in deciding…
Following the publication of Bitcoin's arguably most famous attack, selfish mining, various works have introduced mechanisms to enhance blockchain systems' game theoretic resilience. Some reward mechanisms, like FruitChains, have been shown…