Related papers: Improving Bitcoin's Resilience to Churn
The growing interest in reliable multi-party applications has fostered widespread adoption of Byzantine Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols. Existing BFT protocols need f more replicas than Paxos-style protocols to prevent equivocation…
Bitcoin is a decentralized crypto-currency, and an accompanying protocol, created in 2008. Bitcoin nodes continuously generate and propagate blocks---collections of newly approved transactions that are added to Bitcoin's ledger. Block…
Since the inception of Bitcoin, cryptocurrencies and the underlying blockchain technology have attracted an increasing interest from both academia and industry. Among various core components, consensus protocol is the defining technology…
Blockchain (BC) systems are highly distributed peer-to-peer networks that offer an alternative to centralized services and promise robustness to coordinated attacks. However, the resilience and overall security of a BC system rests heavily…
Recent developments in blockchain technology have inspired innovative new designs in resilient distributed and database systems. At their core, these blockchain applications typically use Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols to…
Authorization is challenging in distributed systems that cannot rely on the identification of nodes. Proof-of-work offers an alternative gate-keeping mechanism, but its probabilistic nature is incompatible with conventional security…
Low throughput has been the biggest obstacle of large-scale blockchain applications. During the past few years, researchers have proposed various schemes to improve the systems' throughput. However, due to the inherent inefficiency and…
Blockchain systems are designed to produce blocks at a constant average rate. The most popular systems currently employ a Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm as a means of creating these blocks. Bitcoin produces, on average, one block every 10…
Low latency is one of the desired properties for partially synchronous Byzantine consensus protocols. Previous protocols have achieved consensus with just two communication steps either by reducing the bound on the number of faults the…
In the context of the `selfish-mine' strategy proposed by Eyal and Sirer, we study the effect of propagation delay on the evolution of the Bitcoin blockchain. First, we use a simplified Markov model that tracks the contrasting states of…
High availability is no longer just a business continuity concern. Users are increasingly dependant on devices that consume and produce data in ever increasing volumes. A popular solution is to have a central repository which each device…
We present Fission, a new permissionless blockchain that achieves scalability in both terms of system throughput and transaction confirmation time, while at the same time, retaining blockchain's core values of equality and decentralization.…
Bitcoin is a popular alternative to fiat money, widely used for its perceived anonymity properties. However, recent attacks on Bitcoin's peer-to-peer (P2P) network demonstrated that its gossip-based flooding protocols, which are used to…
Mining pools, the main components of the Bitcoin network, dominate the computing resources and play essential roles in network security and performance aspects. Although many existing measurements of the Bitcoin network are available,…
Peer-to-peer protocols play an increasingly instrumental role in Internet content distribution. It is therefore important to gain a complete understanding of how these protocols behave in practice and how their operating parameters affect…
The Bitcoin protocol is a significant milestone in the history of money. However, its adoption is currently constrained by the transaction limits of the system. As the chief problem of blockchain technology, the scaling issue has attracted…
In the area of blockchain, numerous methods have been proposed for suppressing intentional forks by attackers more effectively than the random rule. However, all of them, except for the random rule, require major updates, rely on a trusted…
The Bitcoin cryptocurrency records its transactions in a public log called the blockchain. Its security rests critically on the distributed protocol that maintains the blockchain, run by participants called miners. Conventional wisdom…
There is surge of interest to the blockchain technology not only in the scientific community but in the business community as well. Proof of Work (PoW) and Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) are the two main classes of consensus protocols that…
Blockchains based on the celebrated Nakamoto consensus protocol have shown promise in several applications, including cryptocurrencies. However, these blockchains have inherent scalability limits caused by the protocol's consensus…