Blockchain Papers

Juan José García Chávez, Carlo Kleber da Silva Rodrigues

Herein it is proposed a simple algorithm for automatic hopping among mining pools in the Bitcoin network. The hopping ceases to occur when the best pool to be mined is found. The choice of the best pool is based on statistical data generated and collected during the operation of the Bitcoin network. Experiments for validation and performance analysis are based on mining networks built specifically for this purpose. The major results show for instance that the bitcoin generation increases at 46.0% comparing to when the mining is carried out in only one isolated pool. Additionally, it is evaluated the possibility of implementing a distributed application making use of the proposed algorithm. Lastly, general conclusions and possible avenues for future works are highlighted at the end of this article.

Arthur Gervais, Hubert Ritzdorf, Ghassan Karame, Srđjan Čapkun

Given the increasing adoption of Bitcoin, the number of transactions and the block sizes within the system are only expected to increase. To sustain its correct operation in spite of its ever-increasing use, Bitcoin implements a number of necessary optimizations and scalability measures. These measures limit the amount of information broadcast in the system to the minimum necessary. In this paper, we show that current scalability measures adopted by Bitcoin come at odds with the security of the system. More specifically, we show that an adversary can exploit these measures in order to effectively delay the propagation of transactions and blocks to specific nodes for a considerable amount of time---without causing a network partitioning in the system. Notice that this attack alters the information received by Bitcoin nodes, and modifies their views of the ledger state. Namely, we show that this allows the adversary to considerably increase its mining advantage in the network, and to double-spend transactions in spite of the current countermeasures adopted by Bitcoin. Based on our results, we propose a number of countermeasures in order to enhance the security of Bitcoin without deteriorating its scalability.