[Resource Topic] 2020/1367: Costs of an Attack Against Proof-of-Work

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Title:
Costs of an Attack Against Proof-of-Work

Authors: 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.

ePrint: https://eprint.iacr.org/2020/1367

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