Formally Defining Economic Security for Permissionless Consensus ∞ Research

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Briefing

The paper addresses the critical gap in formally defining and analyzing the economic security of permissionless consensus protocols. It proposes a foundational framework to quantify the economic cost of attacks. This new theoretical lens is crucial for designing blockchain architectures that make adversarial actions prohibitively expensive without collateral damage to honest participants, thereby enhancing long-term system stability.

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Context

Prior to this research, the security of permissionless consensus protocols primarily relied on distributed computing arguments, focusing on consistency and liveness under Byzantine fault tolerance. A significant theoretical limitation existed in formally evaluating the economic cost of mounting attacks, such as 51% attacks in Proof of Work or 34% attacks in Proof of Stake, and the associated collateral damage to honest network participants.

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Analysis

The core idea involves establishing a formal methodology to assess the economic security of consensus protocols. This method quantifies the financial incentives and disincentives for adversarial behavior. It integrates economic arguments as a primary component of security analysis. The approach aims to define how protocols can programmatically confiscate attacker stakes to deter violations, ensuring consistency without broad negative impact on the ecosystem.

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Parameters

Core Concept ∞ Economic Security Quantification
Key Authors ∞ Eric Budish, Andrew Lewis-Pye
Problem Addressed ∞ Economic Cost of Attacks
Framework Type ∞ Formal Economic Argument
Relevant Protocols ∞ Proof of Work, Proof of Stake (e.g. Ethereum)

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Outlook

This foundational work paves the way for a more rigorous comparison of economic security across various blockchain consensus protocols. It will enable the design of next-generation decentralized systems that are inherently more resilient to economically motivated attacks, potentially unlocking new avenues for truly robust and fair blockchain architectures in the coming years.

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Verdict

This research decisively establishes a critical new dimension for evaluating blockchain security, shifting focus towards economic robustness as a core design principle.

Signal Acquired from ∞ arxiv.org