Related papers: The Consensus Number of a Cryptocurrency (Extended…
This article will take you on a journey to the core of blockchains, their Byzantine consensus engine, where HotStuff emerged as a new algorithmic foundation for the classical Byzantine generals consensus problem. The first part of the…
Consensus is unnecessary when the truth is available. In this paper, we present a new perspective of rebuilding the blockchain without consensus. When the consensus phase is eliminated from a blockchain, transactions could be canonized…
Although blockchains have become widely popular for their use in cryptocurrencies, they are now becoming pervasive as more traditional applications adopt blockchain to ensure data security. Despite being a secured network, blockchains have…
It is a critical matter for a blockchain system whether a Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) can be guaranteed during a consensus process. Can connected vehicles (CVs) achieve the BFT consensus when the vehicles keep mobile? This paper seeks…
Recent advances have improved the throughput and latency of blockchains by processing transactions accessing different parts of the state concurrently. However, these systems are unable to concurrently process (a) transactions accessing the…
In the white book of Bitcion, Satoshi Nakamoto described a bitcoin system that can realize point-to-point online payment without a third-party organization. After supporting this magical application scenario and subverting the traditional…
We define and examine the shutdown problem for blockchain systems: how to gracefully end the system's operation at the end of its useful life. A particular focus is those blockchain systems that hold archival data of long-lived interest. We…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are well documented and are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. In our previous proof-of-concept work, we have shown that separating computation…
Decentralization is widely recognized as a crucial characteristic of blockchains that enables them to resist malicious attacks such as the 51% attack and the takeover attack. Prior research has primarily examined decentralization in…
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…
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…
The success of blockchain as the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies has opened up possibilities for its use in other application domains as well. The main advantages of blockchain for its potential use in other domains are its…
The recent surge of blockchain systems has renewed the interest in traditional Byzantine fault-tolerant consensus protocols. Many such consensus protocols have a primary-backup design in which an assigned replica, the primary, is…
Modern blockchain systems are a fresh look at the paradigm of distributed computing, applied under assumptions of large-scale public networks. They can be used to store and share information without a trusted central party. There has been…
Distributed algorithms solving agreement problems like consensus or state machine replication are essential components of modern fault-tolerant distributed services. They are also notoriously hard to understand and reason about. Their…
Blockchains rely on a consensus among participants to achieve decentralization and security. However, reaching consensus in an online, digital world where identities are not tied to physical users is a challenging problem. Proof-of-work…
A decentralized blockchain is a distributed ledger that is often used as a platform for exchanging goods and services. This ledger is maintained by a network of nodes that obeys a set of rules, called a consensus protocol, which helps to…
Consensus protocols play a pivotal role to balance security and efficiency in blockchain systems. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework for blockchain consensus protocols termed as AlphaBlock. In this framework, we compare the…
Blockchain systems run consensus rules as code to agree on the state of the distributed ledger and secure the network. Changing these rules can be risky and challenging. In addition, it can often be controversial and take much effort to…
Nakamoto double spend strategy, described in Bitcoin foundational article, leads to total ruin with positive probability and does not make sense from the profitability point of view. The simplest strategy that can be profitable incorporates…