On the foundations of proof-of-work based blockchain protocols

Proof-of-work (PoW) based blockchain protocols, are protocols that organize data into blocks, connected through the use of a hash function to form chains, and which make use of PoW to reach agreement, i.e., proofs that require spending some amount of computational power to be generated. This type of protocols rose into prominence with the advent of Bitcoin, the first protocol that provably implements a distributed transaction ledger against an adversary that controls less than half of the total computational power in the network, in a setting where protocol participants join and leave dynamically without the need for a registration service. Protocols in this class were also the first to be shown sufficient to solve consensus under similar conditions, a problem of fundamental importance in distributed computing. In this thesis, we explore foundational issues of PoW-based blockchain protocols that mainly have to do with the assumptions required to ensure their safe operation. We start by examining whether a common random string that is shared at the start of the protocol execution among the protocol participants is required to efficiently run such protocols. Bitcoin's security is based on the existence of such a string, called the genesis block. On the other hand, protocols found in previous works that do not assume such a setup are inefficient, in the sense that their round complexity strongly depends on the number of protocol participants. Our first contribution is the construction of efficient PoW-based blockchain protocols that provably implement a distributed ledger and consensus without such setup. Next, we turn our attention to the PoW primitive. All previous analyses model PoW using a random oracle. While satisfactory as a sanity check, the random oracle methodology has received significant criticism and shown not to be sound. We make progress by introducing a non-idealized security model and appropriate computational assumptions that are sufficient to implement a distributed ledger or consensus when combined with the right PoW-based protocol. Finally, we analyze GHOST, a recently proposed blockchain protocol, and prove its security against a byzantine adversary under similar assumptions as Bitcoin. Previous works only considered specific attacks