• Bitcoin
• block orphaning probability
• block propagation delay
• block reward
• blockchain
• blockchain performance evaluation
• blockchain simulation
• economic incentives
• Ethereum
• mining strategy
• Nakamoto-alike protocols
• Proof-of-Stake
• Proof-of-Work

The past decade has witnessed the rapid evolution in blockchain technology, especially as it relates to incentive-based blockchain protocols, i.e., Nakamoto-alike protocols (e.g., Bitcoin, Ethereum).
Because of the tremendous popularity of Nakamoto-alike blockchains, it appears vital analysing the performance of such protocols. On this subject, history shows profusely the fatal effects of blind blockchain protocols’ development during the actual deployment stage. To name but a few, Bitcoin and Ethereum have been forked several times, either in a not backward compatible way (i.e., a hard fork) or in a backward compatible way (i.e., a soft fork).
Moreover, it is also of paramount importance evaluating the cost of related blockchain-enabled applications. Indeed, assessing the cost of blockchain-enabled applications is the only way to determine whether those solutions are of any practical use.
The motivation of this thesis is to improve the state of the art in the research field of blockchain performance and cost evaluation by addressing several limitations present in literature. Particularly, the contributions provided in this dissertation address the following main problems: I)Complexity of the design and development of Nakamoto-alike blockchain simulators; II)Irrationality of the state-of-the-art mining strategy in Nakamoto-alike blockchain protocols; III)Lack of analysis of the cost of applications enabled by Nakamoto-alike smart contract-compatible blockchain platforms.