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Twenty Percent and a Few Days–Optimising a Bitcoin Majority Attack

Fehnker, Ansgar and Chaudhary, Kaylash C. (2018) Twenty Percent and a Few Days–Optimising a Bitcoin Majority Attack. In: NASA Formal Methods. Lecture Notes in Computer Science . Springer, Switzerland, pp. 157-163. ISBN 978-3-319-77934-8

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Abstract

Bitcoin is a distributed online payment system that organises transactions into blocks. The size of blocks is limited to 1 megabyte, which also limits the number of transactions per second that can be confirmed. This year several attempts have been made to create a fork or a split that removes this restriction. One such alternative is Bitcoin Unlimited (BTU). Proponents of BTU have suggested to use a type of majority attack to force other Bitcoin miners to adopt BTU. In this paper we model this attack in Uppaal, and analyse how long it will take for an attack to succeed, depending on the share the attacker has of the total network, and the so-called confirmation depth. The analysis shows that with a share of 20% an attack will be successful within a few days. This paper also looks at the effect of increasing the confirmation depth as a countermeasure.

Item Type: Book Chapter
Additional Information: DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77935-5
Subjects: Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA75 Electronic computers. Computer science
Q Science > QA Mathematics > QA76 Computer software
Divisions: Faculty of Science, Technology and Environment (FSTE) > School of Computing, Information and Mathematical Sciences
Depositing User: Kaylash Chaudhary
Date Deposited: 09 Jun 2018 00:57
Last Modified: 09 Jun 2018 00:57
URI: http://repository.usp.ac.fj/id/eprint/10795
UNSPECIFIED

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