Imperial College London
Alternate

DrCatherineMulligan

Business School

Casual - Visiting lect, guest spkr, ext. examiner
 
 
 
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Contact

 

+44 (0)20 7594 2916c.mulligan

 
 
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Location

 

Business School BuildingSouth Kensington Campus

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Summary

 

Publications

Citation

BibTex format

@inproceedings{Zamyatin:2017:10.1109/MASCOTS.2017.22,
author = {Zamyatin, A and Wolter, K and Werner, S and Mulligan, CEA and Harrison, PG and Knottenbelt, WJ},
doi = {10.1109/MASCOTS.2017.22},
publisher = {IEEE},
title = {Swimming with fishes and sharks: beneath the surface of queue-based ethereum mining pools},
url = {http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MASCOTS.2017.22},
year = {2017}
}
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RIS format (EndNote, RefMan)

TY  - CPAPER
AB  - Cryptocurrency mining can be said to be the modernalchemy,  involving  as  it  does  the  transmutation  of  electricityinto  digital  gold.  The  goal  of  mining  is  to  guess  the  solutionto  a  cryptographic  puzzle,  the  difficulty  of  which  is  determinedby   the   network,   and   thence   to   win   the   block   reward   andtransaction  fees.  Because  the  return  on  solo  mining  has  a  veryhigh  variance,  miners  band  together  to  create  so-called  miningpools.  These  aggregate  the  power  of  several  individual  miners,and, by distributing the accumulated rewards according to somescheme,  ensure  a  more  predictable  return  for  participants.In this paper we formulate a model of the dynamics of a queue-based reward distribution scheme in a popular Ethereum miningpool and develop a corresponding simulation. We show that theunderlying mechanism disadvantages miners with above-averagehash rates. We then consider two-miner scenarios and show howlarge miners may perform attacks to increase their profits at theexpense of other participants of the mining pool. The outcomes ofour analysis show the queue-based reward scheme is vulnerableto  manipulation  in  its  current  implementation.
AU  - Zamyatin,A
AU  - Wolter,K
AU  - Werner,S
AU  - Mulligan,CEA
AU  - Harrison,PG
AU  - Knottenbelt,WJ
DO  - 10.1109/MASCOTS.2017.22
PB  - IEEE
PY  - 2017///
TI  - Swimming with fishes and sharks: beneath the surface of queue-based ethereum mining pools
UR  - http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/MASCOTS.2017.22
UR  - https://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8107436
UR  - http://hdl.handle.net/10044/1/49112
ER  -
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