Censorship Resistance in On-Chain Auctions
Elijah Fox, Mallesh Pai, Max Resnick

TL;DR
This paper introduces a new measure of censorship resistance in blockchains, focusing on the cost for an adversary to censor transactions within a fixed time, and applies it to improve auction integrity in multi-proposer blockchains.
Contribution
It defines censorship resistance as a cost-based metric considering transaction tips and demonstrates how multi-proposer blockchains can enhance censorship resistance for financial applications like auctions.
Findings
Higher tips increase transaction censorship cost.
Multi-proposer blockchains improve censorship resistance.
Auction integrity benefits from multiple proposers.
Abstract
Modern blockchains guarantee that submitted transactions will be included eventually; a property formally known as liveness. But financial activity requires transactions to be included in a timely manner. Unfortunately, classical liveness is not strong enough to guarantee this, particularly in the presence of a motivated adversary who benefits from censoring transactions. We define censorship resistance as the amount it would cost the adversary to censor a transaction for a fixed interval of time as a function of the associated tip. This definition has two advantages, first it captures the fact that transactions with a higher miner tip can be more costly to censor, and therefore are more likely to swiftly make their way onto the chain. Second, it applies to a finite time window, so it can be used to assess whether a blockchain is capable of hosting financial activity that relies on…
Peer Reviews
No public reviews on file for this paper yet. If you reviewed it on a platform where reviews are public (OpenReview, ICLR, NeurIPS, ICML), you can paste yours below so the community can read it here.
Videos
No videos yet. Explain this paper in a talk, walkthrough, or lecture? Add one.
