Related papers: Emulating OP_RAND in Bitcoin
In today's programmable blockchains, smart contracts are limited to being deterministic and non-probabilistic. This lack of randomness is a consequential limitation, given that a wide variety of real-world financial contracts, such as…
Bitcoin, as one of the most popular cryptocurrency, is recently attracting much attention of investors. Bitcoin price prediction task is consequently a rising academic topic for providing valuable insights and suggestions. Existing bitcoin…
Optimistic responsiveness -- the ability of a consensus protocol to operate at the speed of the network -- is widely used in consensus protocol design to optimize latency and throughput. However, blockchain applications incentivize…
We analyze bribing attacks in Proof-of-Stake distributed ledgers from a game theoretic perspective. In bribing attacks, an adversary offers participants a reward in exchange for instructing them how to behave, with the goal of attacking the…
Programmable blockchains have long been a hot research topic given their tremendous use in decentralized applications. Smart contracts, using blockchains as their underlying technology, inherit the desired properties such as verifiability,…
The present paper introduces a practical protocol for provably secure, outsourced computation. Our protocol minimizes overhead for verification by requiring solutions to withstand an interactive game between a prover and challenger. For…
Blockchains rely on economic incentives to ensure secure and decentralised operation, making incentive compatibility a core design concern. However, protocols are rarely deployed in isolation. Applications interact with the underlying…
Trading data through blockchain platforms is hard to achieve \textit{fair exchange}. Reasons come from two folds: Firstly, guaranteeing fairness between sellers and consumers is a challenging task as the deception of any participating…
Bitcoin provides freshness properties by forming a blockchain where each block is associated with its timestamp and the previous block. Due to these properties, the Bitcoin protocol is being used as a decentralized, trusted, and secure…
Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer cryptographic currency system. Since its introduction in 2008, Bitcoin has gained noticeable popularity, mostly due to its following properties: (1) the transaction fees are very low, and (2) it is not controlled…
We consider the execution of smart contracts on Bitcoin. There, every contract step corresponds to appending to the blockchain a new transaction that spends the output representing the old contract state, creating a new one for the updated…
Although random sequences can be used to generate probability events, they come with the risk of cheating in an unsupervised situation. In such cases, the oblivious transfer protocol may be used and this paper presents a variation to the DH…
Blockchains offer a decentralized and secure execution environment strong enough to host cryptocurrencies, but the state-replication model makes on-chain computation expensive. To avoid heavy on-chain workloads, systems like Truebit and…
In this paper, we investigate the performance of the Tangle 2.0 consensus protocol in a Byzantine environment. We use an agent-based simulation model that incorporates the main features of the Tangle 2.0 consensus protocol. Our experimental…
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…
Covenants are linguistic primitives that extend the Bitcoin script language, allowing transactions to constrain the scripts of the redeeming ones. Advocated as a way of improving the expressiveness of Bitcoin contracts while preserving the…
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…
Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this…
Proof-of-work allows Bitcoin to boast security amidst arbitrary fluctuations in participation of miners throughout time, so long as, at any point in time, a majority of hash power is honest. In recent years, however, the pendulum has…
A major challenge in blockchain sharding protocols is that more than 95% transactions are cross-shard. Not only those cross-shard transactions degrade the system throughput but also double the confirmation time, and exhaust an already…