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BLOCKCHAIN DOUBLE-SPEND ATTACK DURATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 May 2020

Mark Brown ,
Erol Peköz Open the ORCID record for Erol Peköz [Opens in a new window]  and
Sheldon Ross
Mark Brown
Affiliation:
Department of Statistics, Columbia University, New York, NY, USA E-mail: pekoz@bu.edu
Erol Peköz
Affiliation:
School of Business, Boston University, Boston, MA, USA
Sheldon Ross
Affiliation:
Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA, USA
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Abstract

Many cryptocurrencies including Bitcoin are susceptible to a so-called double-spend attack, where someone dishonestly attempts to reverse a recently confirmed transaction. The duration and likelihood of success of such an attack depends on the recency of the transaction and the computational power of the attacker, and these can be related to the distribution of time for counts from one Poisson process to exceed counts from another by some desired amount. We derive an exact expression for this distribution and show how it can be used to obtain efficient simulation estimators. We also give closed-form analytic approximations and illustrate their accuracy.

Keywords

applied probabilityreliability theory
Type
Research Article
Information
Probability in the Engineering and Informational Sciences , Volume 35 , Issue 4 , October 2021 , pp. 858 - 866
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2020

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