In this work we employ the machinery from the Rational Protocol Design (RPD) framework by Garay et al. [FOCS'13] to analyze Bitcoin and address questions such as the above. We show assuming a natural class of incentives for the miners' behavior i.e., rewarding them for adding blocks to the blockchain but having them pay for mining here one can reserve the honest majority assumption as a fallback, or even, depending on the application, completely replace it by the assumption that the miners aim to maximize their revenue.
Our results underscore the appropriateness of RPD as a ``rational cryptography'' framework for analyzing Bitcoin. Along the way, we devise significant extensions to the original RPD machinery that broaden its applicability to cryptocurrencies, which may be of independent interest.
Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / Blockchain Protocols, Rational Protocol Design, Bitcoin Original Publication (with major differences): IACR-EUROCRYPT-2018 Date: received 5 Feb 2018, last revised 16 Feb 2019 Contact author: chrigi badi at gmail com Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation Version: 20190305:124745 (All versions of this report) Short URL: ia.cr/2018/138