Related papers: Selfish Mining under General Stochastic Rewards
Bitcoin-NG is an extensible blockchain protocol based on the same trust model as Bitcoin. It divides each epoch into one Key-Block and multiple Micro-Blocks, effectively improving transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG adopts a special…
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…
The arisen of Bitcoin has led to much enthusiasm for blockchain research and block mining, and the extensive existence of mining pools helps its participants (i.e., miners) gain reward more frequently. Recently, the mining pools are proved…
We give a straightforward proof for the formula giving the long-term apparent hashrate of the Selfish Mining strategy in Bitcoin using only elementary probabilities and combinatorics, and more precisely, Dyck words. There is no need to…
As the second largest cryptocurrency by market capitalization and today's biggest decentralized platform that runs smart contracts, Ethereum has received much attention from both industry and academia. Nevertheless, there exist very few…
The value of proof-of-work cryptocurrencies critically depends on miners having incentives to follow the protocol. However, the Bitcoin mining protocol proposed by Nakamoto (2008) and implemented in practice is well known not to constitute…
The aim of this work is to enhance blockchain security by deepening the understanding of selfish mining attacks in various consensus protocols, especially the ones that have the potential to mitigate selfish mining. Previous research was…
We study the strategic considerations of miners participating in the bitcoin's protocol. We formulate and study the stochastic game that underlies these strategic considerations. The miners collectively build a tree of blocks, and they are…
Bitcoin and Ethereum are the top two blockchain-based cryptocurrencies whether from cryptocurrency market cap or popularity. However, they are vulnerable to selfish mining and stubborn mining due to that both of them adopt Proof-of-Work…
Most public blockchain protocols, including the popular Bitcoin and Ethereum blockchains, do not formally specify the order in which miners should select transactions from the pool of pending (or uncommitted) transactions for inclusion in…
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…
Proof-of-work blockchains reward each miner for one completed block by an amount that is, in expectation, proportional to the number of hashes the miner contributed to the mining of the block. Is this proportional allocation rule optimal?…
We study the incentives behind double-spend attacks on Nakamoto-style Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies. In these systems, miners are allowed to choose which transactions to reference with their block, and a common strategy for selecting…
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…
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…
Blockchain is a technology that provides a distributed ledger that stores previous records while maintaining consistency and security. Bitcoin is the first and largest decentralized electronic cryptographic system that uses blockchain…
As the core technology behind Bitcoin, Blockchain's decentralized, tamper-proof, and traceable features make it the preferred platform for organizational innovation. In current Bitcoin, block reward is halved every four years, and…
In a PoW-based blockchain network, mining pools (the solo miner could be regarded as a mining pool containing one miner) compete to successfully mine blocks to pursue rewards. Generally, the rewards include the fixed block subsidies and…
Bitcoin's security relies on its Proof-of-Work consensus, where miners solve puzzles to propose blocks. The puzzle's difficulty is set by the difficulty adjustment mechanism (DAM), based on the network's available mining power. Attacks that…
Selfish mining is strategic rule-breaking to maximize rewards in proof-of-work protocols. Markov Decision Processes (MDPs) are the preferred tool for finding optimal strategies in Bitcoin and similar linear chain protocols. Protocols…