Related papers: Improving Bitcoin's Resilience to Churn
Existing blockchain systems scale poorly because of their distributed consensus protocols. Current attempts at improving blockchain scalability are limited to cryptocurrency. Scaling blockchain systems under general workloads (i.e.,…
Blockchain is a distributed ledger technology that has applications in many domains such as cryptocurrency, smart contracts, supply chain management, and many others. Distributed consensus is a fundamental component of blockchain systems…
Forks in the Bitcoin network result from the natural competition in the blockchain's Proof-of-Work consensus protocol. Their frequency is a critical indicator for the efficiency of a distributed ledger as they can contribute to resource…
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that incentivizes…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
Over the past decade, the Bitcoin P2P network protocol has become a reference model for all modern cryptocurrencies. While nodes in this network are known, the connections among them are kept hidden, as it is commonly believed that this…
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
Blockchain performance has historically faced challenges posed by the throughput limitations of consensus algorithms. Recent breakthroughs in research have successfully alleviated these constraints by introducing a modular architecture that…
Bitcoin's design promises resilience through decentralization, yet the physical infrastructure supporting the network creates hidden dependencies. We present the first longitudinal study of Bitcoin's resilience to submarine cable failures,…
Some blockchain networks employ a distributed consensus algorithm featuring Byzantine fault tolerance. Notably, certain public chains, such as Cosmos and Tezos, which operate on a proof-of-stake mechanism, have adopted this algorithm. While…
With the advancement of blockchain technology, chained Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols have been increasingly adopted in practical systems, making their performance a crucial aspect of the study. In this paper, we introduce a…
Blockchain is a decentralised, immutable ledger technology that has been widely adopted in many sectors for various applications such as cryptocurrencies, smart contracts and supply chain management. Distributed consensus is a fundamental…
Blockchains have attracted a great deal of attention as a technology for the distributed management of register information at multiple nodes without a centralized system. However, they possess the drawbacks of low transaction throughput…
Blockchains have a storage scalability issue. Their size is not bounded and they grow indefinitely as time passes. As of August 2017, the Bitcoin blockchain is about 120 GiB big while it was only 75 GiB in August 2016. To benefit from…
A blockchain is a distributed ledger for recording transactions, maintained by many nodes without central authority through a distributed cryptographic protocol. All nodes validate the information to be appended to the blockchain, and a…
Streamlined Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols, such as HotStuff [PODC'19], and weighted voting represent two possible strategies to improve consensus in the distributed systems world. Several studies have been conducted on both…
Currently there exist many blockchains with weak trust guarantees, limiting applications and participation. Existing solutions to boost the trust using a stronger blockchain, e.g., via checkpointing, requires the weaker blockchain to give…
Recent estimates put the carbon footprint of Bitcoin and Ethereum at an average of 64 and 26 million tonnes of CO2 per year, respectively. To address this growing problem, several possible approaches have been proposed in the literature:…
Bitcoin is currently subject to a significant pay-for-speed trade-off. This is caused by lengthy and highly variable transaction confirmation times, especially during times of congestion. Users can reduce their transaction confirmation…
The sharing economy is centralizing services, leading to misuses of the Internet. We can list growing damages of data hacks, global outages and even the use of data to manipulate their owners. Unfortunately, there is no decentralized web…