Description
TL;DR: A quantitative attempt to connect Bitcoin confirmation policy with the economics of double spending rather than treating every confirmation count as equally safe.
About This Document
George Bissias, Brian Neil Levine, A. Pinar Ozisik, and Gavin Andresen develop and validate a continuous-time model of blockchain mining. They examine how attacker hash power, merchant confirmation depth, deadlines, transaction value, simultaneous targets, and a concurrent eclipse attack affect whether a double spend can be profitable. The paper also discusses why systems bootstrapped from Bitcoin transactions, including sidechains and payment channels, inherit assumptions about the base chain.
Why Bitcoin People May Care
The paper makes security concrete: six confirmations is a convention, not a magic shield detached from value and adversary resources. Its numerical conclusions belong to the network data and assumptions used in 2016, but the modeling questions remain useful for merchants, protocol researchers, and anyone evaluating what confirmation actually buys.
What You Receive
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Document Details
- Title: An Analysis of Attacks on Blockchain Consensus
- Author / organization: George Bissias, Brian Neil Levine, A. Pinar Ozisik, and Gavin Andresen
- Year: 2016
- Language: English
- Document type: Research paper
- Pages: 19
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