Paper
Larger Scale Offers Better Security in the Nakamoto-style Blockchain
Authors
Junjie Hu
Abstract
Traditional security models for Nakamoto-style blockchains assume instantaneous synchronization among malicious nodes, which overestimate adversarial coordination capability. We revisit these existing models and propose two more realistic security models. First, we propose the static delay model. This model first incorporates adversarial communication delay. It quantifies how the delay constrains the effective growth rate of private chains and yields a closed-form expression for the security threshold. Second, we propose the dynamic delay model that further captures the decay of adversarial corruption capability and the total adversarial delay window. Theoretical analysis shows that private attacks remain optimal under both models. Finally, we prove that large-scale Nakamoto-style blockchains offer better security. This result provided a theoretical foundation for optimizing consensus protocols and assessing the robustness of large-scale blockchains.