Work

Optimal bootstrapping of PoW blockchains

Year: 2022

Type: conference-paper

Abstract: Proof of Work (PoW) blockchains are susceptible to adversarial majority mining attacks in the early stages due to incipient participation and corresponding low net hash power. Bootstrapping ensures safety and liveness during the transient stage by protecting against a majority mining attack, allowing a PoW chain to grow the participation base and corresponding mining hash power. Liveness is especially important since a loss of liveness will lead to loss of honest mining rewards, decreasing honest participation, hence creating an undesired spiral; indeed existing bootstrapping mechanisms offer especially weak liveness guarantees.

Source: ACM International Symposium on Theory, Algorithmic Foundations, and Protocol Design for Mobile Networks and Mobile Computing (MobiHoc)

DOI: 10.1145/3492866.3549731

Authors: Ranvir Rana, Dimitris Karakostas, Sreeram Kannan, Aggelos Kiayias, Pramod Viswanath

Institutions: University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, University of Edinburgh, University of Washington

Language: English

Topic: Blockchain Technology Applications and Security

Subfield: Information Systems

Field: Computer Science

Domain: Physical Sciences

Open Access status: green

Funder: National Science Foundation

Award: CIF: Medium: Anonymous Broadcasting over Networks: Fundamental Limits and Algorithms