Paper 2020/1367
Costs of an Attack Against Proof-of-Work
Loïc Etienne
Abstract
Bitcoin is a blockchain whose immutability relies on Proof-of-Work: Before appending a new block, some so-called miner has to solve a cryptographic challenge by brute force. The blockchain is spread over a network of faithful miners, whose cumulated computing power is assumed to be so large that, among other things, it should be too expensive for an attacker to mine a secret fork $n$ blocks longer than the main blockchain, provided that $n$ is big enough. For a given targeted advance of $n$ blocks, we investigate the expected time for the attacker to mine such a secret fork, the underlying cumulative distribution function, and some related optimization problems.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Keywords
- BitcoinBlockchainProof-of-WorkDouble-spending
- Contact author(s)
-
loic etienne @ pwc ch
loic jonas etienne @ gmail com - History
- 2020-11-02: received
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2020/1367
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2020/1367,
author = {Loïc Etienne},
title = {Costs of an Attack Against Proof-of-Work},
howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2020/1367},
year = {2020},
note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1367}},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1367}
}
