Abstract
Decentralized cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin have ignited much excitement, not only for their novel realization of central bank-free financial instruments, but also as an alternative approach to classical distributed computing problems, such as reaching agreement distributedly in the presence of misbehaving parties, as well as to numerous other applications―contracts, reputation systems, name services, etc. The soundness and security of these applications, however, hinge on the thorough understanding of the fundamental properties of their underlying blockchain data structure, which parties (“miners”) maintain and try to extend by generating proofs of various kinds, “proofs of work” (PoW, aka “cryptographic puzzle”) perhaps being the most interesting ones.
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