Related papers: Bitcoin: A Non-Continuous Time System
Bitcoin is a cryptocurrency attracting a lot of interest both from the general public and researchers. There is an ongoing debate on the question of users' anonymity: while the Bitcoin protocol has been designed to ensure that the activity…
We construct and study the Google matrix of Bitcoin transactions during the time period from the very beginning in 2009 till April 2013. The Bitcoin network has up to a few millions of bitcoin users and we present its main characteristics…
Blockchain technologies are facing a scalability challenge, which must be overcome to guarantee a wider adoption of the technology. This scalability issue is mostly caused by the use of consensus algorithms to guarantee the total order of…
This study, to the best of our knowledge for the first time, delves into the spatiotemporal dynamics of Bitcoin transactions, shedding light on the scaling laws governing its geographic usage. Leveraging a dataset of IP addresses and…
Bitcoin is the most secure blockchain in the world, supported by the immense hash power of its Proof-of-Work miners. Proof-of-Stake chains are energy-efficient, have fast finality but face several security issues: susceptibility to…
Bitcoin, a decentralized cryptocurrency, has attracted a lot of attention from academia, financial service industry and enthusiasts. The trade-off between transaction confirmation throughput and centralization of hash power do not allow…
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
Clock synchronization is a very fundamental task in distributed system. It thus makes sense to require an underlying clock synchronization mechanism to be highly fault-tolerant. A self-stabilizing algorithm seeks to attain synchronization…
We review the behaviour of the Gibbs' and conditional entropies in deterministic and stochastic systems and continue to a formulation appropriate for a stochastically perturbed system with delayed dynamics. The underlying question driving…
Simple closed-form upper and lower bounds are developed for the security of the Nakamoto consensus as a function of the confirmation depth, the honest and adversarial block mining rates, and an upper bound on the block propagation delay.…
We show that infinite divisibility of a trading commodity leads to a self-sustained price bubble when traders use adaptive investment strategies. The adaptive strategy can be viewed as a psychological response of a trader to the situation…
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…
As distributed ledgers, blockchains run consensus protocols which trade capacity for consistency, especially in non-ideal networks with incomplete connectivity and erroneous links. Existing studies on the tradeoff between capacity and…
Many large decentralized systems rely on information propagation to ensure their proper function. We examine a common scenario in which only participants that are aware of the information can compete for some reward, and thus informed…
There exist many forms of Blockchain finality conditions, from deterministic to probabilistic terminations. To favor availability against consistency in the face of partitions, most blockchains only offer probabilistic eventual finality:…
Cryptocurrencies, based on and led by Bitcoin, have shown promise as infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments, cheap remittance, trustless digital asset exchange, and smart contracts. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchain protocols…
The bitcoin price has surged in recent years and it has also exhibited phases of rapid decay. In this paper we address the question to what extent this novel cryptocurrency market can be viewed as a classic or semi-efficient market. Novel…
Forks in the Bitcoin network result from the natural competition in the blockchain's Proof-of-Work consensus protocol. Their frequency is a critical indicator for the efficiency of a distributed ledger as they can contribute to resource…
Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, while central to achieving decentralized consensus, has long been criticized for excessive energy use and hardware inefficiencies \cite{devries2018bitcoin, truby2018decarbonizing}. This paper…
The continuing expansion of the blockchain ecosystems has attracted much attention from the research community. However, although a large number of research studies have been proposed to understand the diverse characteristics of individual…