Related papers: Inertial Mining: Equilibrium Implementation of the…
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…
In this paper, we provide a new theoretical framework of pyramid Markov processes to solve some open and fundamental problems of blockchain selfish mining under a rigorous mathematical setting. We first describe a more general model of…
We compute and compare profitabilities of stubborn mining strategies that are variations of selfish mining. These are deviant mining strategies violating Bitcoin's network protocol rules. We apply the foundational set-up from our previous…
Cryptographic Self-Selection is a common primitive underlying leader-selection for Proof-of-Stake blockchain protocols. The concept was first popularized in Algorand [CM19], who also observed that the protocol might be manipulable. [FHWY22]…
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…
This paper studies a fundamental problem regarding the security of blockchain PoW consensus on how the existence of multiple misbehaving miners influences the profitability of selfish mining. Each selfish miner (or attacker interchangeably)…
Bitcoin is a "crypto currency", a decentralized electronic payment scheme based on cryptography. Bitcoin economy grows at an incredibly fast rate and is now worth some 10 billions of dollars. Bitcoin mining is an activity which consists of…
Bitcoin-NG, a scalable blockchain protocol, divides each block into a key block and many micro blocks to effectively improve the transaction processing capacity. Bitcoin-NG has a special incentive mechanism (i.e. splitting transaction fees…
A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…
All public blockchains are secured by a proof of opportunity cost among block producers. For example, the security offered by proof-of-work (PoW) systems, like Bitcoin, is due to spent computation; it is work precisely because it cannot be…
Bitcoin mining presents a significant economic incentive for efficient hashing and broadcast of data, both parameters stemming from the Proofs of Work used to advance the network. This incentive has led to the development of Bitcoin…
Researchers have discovered a series of theoretical attacks against Bitcoin's Nakamoto consensus; the most damaging ones are selfish mining, double-spending, and consistency delay attacks. These attacks have one common cause: block…
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.…
Nakamoto consensus underlies the security of many of the world's largest cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Common lore is that Nakamoto consensus only achieves consistency and liveness under a regime where the difficulty of…
We analyze how secure a block is after the block becomes $k$-deep, i.e., security-latency, for Nakamoto consensus under an exponential network delay model. We provide the fault tolerance and extensive bounds on safety violation…
Nakamoto double spend strategy, described in Bitcoin foundational article, leads to total ruin with positive probability and does not make sense from the profitability point of view. The simplest strategy that can be profitable incorporates…
Proof-of-work computation used in cryptocurrencies has witnessed significant growth in the U.S. and many other regions around the world. One of the most significant bottlenecks for the scalable deployment of such computation is its energy…
The core of many cryptocurrencies is the decentralised validation network operating on proof-of-work technology. In these systems, validation is done by so-called miners who can digitally sign blocks once they solve a computationally-hard…
In the area of blockchain, numerous methods have been proposed for suppressing intentional forks by attackers more effectively than the random rule. However, all of them, except for the random rule, require major updates, rely on a trusted…
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies prioritize transactions based on their fees, creating a unique kind of fee market. Empirically, this market has failed to yield stable equilibria with predictable prices for desired levels of service. We…