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Miners in a blockchain system are suffering from ever-increasing storage costs, which in general have not been properly compensated by the users' transaction fees. This reduces the incentives for the miners' participation and may jeopardize…
Mining blocks on a blockchain equipped with a proof of work consensus protocol is well-known to be resource-consuming. A miner bears the operational cost, mainly electricity consumption and IT gear, of mining, and is compensated by a…
This paper presents a stochastic model for block arrival times based on the difficulty retargeting rule used in Bitcoin, as well as other proof-of-work blockchains. Unlike some previous work, this paper explicitly models the difficulty…
Although Bitcoin was intended to be a decentralized digital currency, in practice, mining power is quite concentrated. This fact is a persistent source of concern for the Bitcoin community. We provide an explanation using a simple model to…
The selfish mining attack, arguably the most famous game-theoretic attack in blockchain, indicates that the Bitcoin protocol is not incentive-compatible. Most subsequent works mainly focus on strengthening the selfish mining strategy, thus…
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…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies secure a decentralized consensus protocol by incentives. The protocol participants, called miners, generate (mine) a series of blocks, each containing monetary transactions created by system users. As…
Strategic mining attacks, such as selfish mining, exploit blockchain consensus protocols by deviating from honest behavior to maximize rewards. Markov Decision Process (MDP) analysis faces scalability challenges in modern digital economics,…
Several attacks have been proposed against Proof-of-Work blockchains, which may increase the attacker's share of mining rewards (e.g., selfish mining, block withholding). A further impact of such attacks, which has not been considered in…
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that incentivizes…
TrueBit is a protocol that uses interactive verification to allow a resource-constrained computation environment like a blockchain to perform much larger computations than usual in a trusted way. As long as a single honest participant is…
Recent research efforts have shown that the popular BitTorrent protocol does not provide fair resource reciprocation and may allow free-riding. In this paper, we propose a BitTorrent-like protocol that replaces the peer selection mechanisms…
Blockchain systems, such as Ethereum, are increasingly adopting layer-2 scaling solutions to improve transaction throughput and reduce fees. One popular layer-2 approach is the Optimistic Rollup, which relies on a mechanism known as a…
Reducing financial risk is of paramount importance to investors, financial institutions, and corporations. Since the pioneering contribution of Johnson (1960), the optimal hedge ratio based on futures is regularly utilized. The current…
Security often receives insufficient developer attention because it does not directly generate visible value, leading to underinvestment in practice. We evaluate a countermeasure by team-level incentives tied to measurable security…
We propose a mean field game model to study the question of how centralization of reward and computational power occur in Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies. Miners compete against each other for mining rewards by increasing their computational…
The consensus protocol named proof of work (PoW) is widely applied by cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin. Although security of a PoW cryptocurrency is always the top priority, it is threatened by mining attacks like selfish mining. Researchers…
Bitcoin is the first implementation of what has become known as a 'public permissionless' blockchain. Guaranteeing security and protocol conformity through its elegant combination of cryptographic assurances and game theoretic economic…
This paper introduces a game-theoretic model tailored for reward distribution on crowd-sourced computing platforms. It explores a repeated game framework where miners, as computation providers, decide their computation power contribution in…
Seminal work of Eyal and Sirer (2014) establishes that a strategic Bitcoin miner may strictly profit by deviating from the intended Bitcoin protocol, using a strategy now termed *selfish mining*. More specifically, any miner with $>1/3$ of…