



@article {2767,
	title = {RPPLNS: Pay-per-last-N-shares with a Randomised Twist},
	year = {2021},
	month = {2/15/2021},
	abstract = {<p>\&quot;Pay-per-last-N-shares\&quot; (PPLNS) is one of the most common payout strategies used by mining pools in Proof-of-Work (PoW) cryptocurrencies. As with any payment scheme, it is imperative to study issues of incentive compatibility of miners within the pool. For PPLNS this question has only been partially answered; we know that reasonably-sized miners within a PPLNS pool prefer following the pool protocol over employing specific deviations. In this paper, we present a novel modification to PPLNS where we randomise the protocol in a natural way. We call our protocol \&quot;Randomised pay-per-last-N-shares\&quot; (RPPLNS), and note that the randomised structure of the protocol greatly simplifies the study of its incentive compatibility. We show that RPPLNS maintains the strengths of PPLNS (i.e., fairness, variance reduction, and resistance to pool hopping), while also being robust against a richer class of strategic mining than what has been shown for PPLNS.</p>},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2102.07681},
	author = {Philip Lazos and Francisco J. Marmolejo-Coss{\'\i}o and Xinyu Zhou and Jonathan Katz}
}
@article {2407,
	title = {Competing (Semi)-Selfish Miners in Bitcoin},
	year = {2019},
	month = {06/11/2019},
	abstract = {<p>The Bitcoin protocol prescribes certain behavior by the miners who are responsible for maintaining and extending the underlying blockchain; in particular, miners who successfully solve a puzzle, and hence can extend the chain by a block, are supposed to release that block immediately. Eyal and Sirer showed, however, that a selfish miner is incentivized to deviate from the protocol and withhold its blocks under certain conditions. The analysis by Eyal and Sirer, as well as in followup work, considers a \emph{single} deviating miner (who may control a large fraction of the hashing power in the network) interacting with a remaining pool of honest miners. Here, we extend this analysis to the case where there are \emph{multiple} (non-colluding) selfish miners. We find that with multiple strategic miners, specific deviations from honest mining by multiple strategic agents can outperform honest mining, even if individually miners would not be incentivised to be dishonest. This previous point effectively renders the Bitcoin protocol to be less secure than previously thought.\&nbsp;</p>},
	url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/1906.04502},
	author = {Francisco J. Marmolejo-Coss{\'\i}o and Eric Brigham and Benjamin Sela and Jonathan Katz}
}
