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conference paper

On the Unfairness of Blockchain

Guerraoui, Rachid  
•
Wang, Jingjing
2018
Networked Systems
NETYS 2018

The success of Bitcoin largely relies on the perception of a fair underlying peer-to-peer protocol: blockchain. Fairness here essentially means that the reward (in bitcoins) given to any participant that helps maintain the consistency of the protocol by mining, is proportional to the computational power devoted by that participant to the mining task. Without such perception of fairness, honest miners might be disincentivized to maintain the protocol, leaving the space for dishonest miners to reach a majority and jeopardize the consistency of the entire system. We prove, in this paper, that blockchain is actually unfair, even in a distributed system of only two honest miners. In a realistic setting where message delivery is not instantaneous, the ratio between the (expected) number of blocks committed by two miners is at least exponential in the product of the message delay and the difference between the two miners' hashrates. To obtain our result, we model the growth of blockchain, which may be of independent interest. We also apply our result to explain recent empirical observations and vulnerabilities.

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Type
conference paper
DOI
10.1007/978-3-030-05529-5_3
Author(s)
Guerraoui, Rachid  
Wang, Jingjing
Date Issued

2018

Publisher

Springer

Published in
Networked Systems
Start page

36

End page

50

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DCL  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
NETYS 2018

Essaouira, Morocco

May 9, 2018 - May 11, 2018

Available on Infoscience
November 20, 2018
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/151522
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