Related papers: (Im)possibility of Incentive Design for Challenge-…
In decentralized cloud computing marketplaces, ensuring fair and efficient interactions among asset providers and end-users is crucial. A key concern is meeting agreed-upon service-level objectives like the service's reliability. In this…
The emergence of more and more blockchain solutions with innovative approaches to optimising performance, scalability, privacy and governance complicates performance analysis. Reasons for the difficulty of benchmarking blockchains include,…
Blockchain architectures promise disruptive innovation but factually they pose many architectural restrictions to classical service-based applications and show considerable design, implementation, and operations overhead. Furthermore, the…
Nowadays, sharding is deemed as a promising way to save traditional blockchain protocols from their low scalability. However, such technique also brings several potential risks and huge communication overheads. An improper design may give…
Selfish mining is a well known vulnerability in blockchains exploited by miners to steal block rewards. In this paper, we explore a new form of selfish mining attack that guarantees high rewards with low cost. We show the feasibility of…
Consensus protocols inherently rely on the notion of leader election, in which one or a subset of participants are temporarily elected to authorize and announce the network's latest state. While leader election is a well studied problem,…
Machine learning has recently enabled large advances in artificial intelligence, but these results can be highly centralized. The large datasets required are generally proprietary; predictions are often sold on a per-query basis; and…
We propose a new coded blockchain scheme suitable for the Internet-of-Things (IoT) network. In contrast to existing works for coded blockchains, especially blockchain-of-things, the proposed scheme is more realistic, practical, and secure…
Blockchain-based consensus protocols present the opportunity to develop new protocols, due to their novel requirements of open participation and explicit incentivization of participants. To address the first requirement, it is necessary to…
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…
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…
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…
Transaction fees represent a major incentive in many blockchain systems as a way to incentivize processing transactions. Unfortunately, they also introduce an enormous amount of incentive asymmetry compared to alternatives like fixed block…
While many distributed consensus protocols provide robust liveness and consistency guarantees under the presence of malicious actors, quantitative estimates of how economic incentives affect security are few and far between. In this paper,…
Most concurrent blockchain systems rely heavily on the Proof-of-Work (PoW) or Proof-of-Stake (PoS) mechanisms for decentralized consensus and security assurance. However, the substantial energy expenditure stemming from computationally…
Tendermint-core blockchains (e.g. Cosmos) are considered today one of the most viable alternatives for the highly energy consuming proof-of-work blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Their particularity is that they aim at offering…
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…
Many protocols in distributed computing rely on a source of randomness, usually called a random beacon, both for their applicability and security. This is especially true for proof-of-stake blockchain protocols in which the next miner or…
As a trusted middleware connecting the blockchain and the real world, the blockchain oracle can obtain trusted real-time price information for financial applications such as payment and settlement, and asset valuation on the blockchain.…
Proof-of-work blockchains need to be carefully designed so as to create the proper incentives for miners to faithfully maintain the network in a sustainable way. This paper describes how the economic engineering of the Conflux Network, a…