Related papers: Practical Low Latency Proof of Work Consensus
Zero-Knowledge Proof-of-Identity from trusted public certificates (e.g., national identity cards and/or ePassports; eSIM) is introduced here to permissionless blockchains in order to remove the inefficiencies of Sybil-resistant mechanisms…
Blockchains have recently gained popularity thanks to their ability to record "digital truth". They are designed to keep persistence, security, and avoid attacks which is useful for many applications. However, they are still problematic in…
We introduce Unity, a new consensus algorithm for public blockchain settings. Unity is an eventual consistency protocol merging the Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) into a coherent stochastic process. It encompasses hardware and…
Blockchain consensus mechanisms must balance security, decentralization, and efficiency while ensuring fair participation. Proof of Team Sprint (PoTS) is a cooperative consensus mechanism designed to address the energy inefficiencies and…
Permissionless consensus protocols require a scarce resource to regulate leader election and provide Sybil resistance. Existing paradigms such as Proof of Work and Proof of Stake instantiate this scarcity through parallelizable resources…
Bitcoin is the first successful decentralized global digital cash system. Its mining process requires intense computational resources, therefore its usefulness remains a disputable topic. We aim to solve three problems with Bitcoin and…
In the light of the recent fame of Blockchain technologies, numerous proposals and projects aiming at better practical viability have emerged. However, formally assessing their particularities and benefits has proven to be a difficult task.…
We study efficiency in a proof-of-work blockchain with non-zero latencies, focusing in particular on the (inequality in) individual miners' efficiencies. Prior work attributed differences in miners' efficiencies mostly to attacks, but we…
The Nakamoto longest chain protocol is remarkably simple and has been proven to provide security against any adversary with less than 50% of the total hashing power. Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are an energy efficient alternative;…
As cryptographic tokens and altcoins are increasingly being built to serve as utility tokens, the notion of useful work consensus protocols, as opposed to number-crunching PoW consensus, is becoming ever more important. In such contexts,…
Contemporary blockchain such as Bitcoin and Ethereum execute transactions serially by miners and validators and determine the Proof-of-Work (PoW). Such serial execution is unable to exploit modern multi-core resources efficiently, hence…
We introduce a new permissionless blockchain architecture called ABC. ABC is completely asynchronous, and does rely on neither randomness nor proof-of-work. ABC can be parallelized, and transactions have finality within one round trip of…
A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…
Throughput limitations of existing blockchain architectures are one of the most significant hurdles for their wide-spread adoption. Attempts to address this challenge include layer-2 solutions, such as Bitcoin's Lightning or Ethereum's…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) blockchains have emerged as a robust and effective consensus mechanism in open environments, leading to widespread deployment with numerous cryptocurrency platforms and substantial investments. However, the commonly…
Proof-of-Work is a consensus algorithm where miners solve cryptographic puzzles to mine blocks and obtain a reward through some Block Reward Mechanism (BRM). PoW blockchain faces the problem of centralization due to the formation of mining…
Several emerging PoW blockchain protocols rely on a "parallel-chain" architecture for scaling, where instead of a single chain, multiple chains are run in parallel and aggregated. A key requirement of practical PoW blockchains is to adapt…
Most state machine replication protocols are either based on the 40-years-old Byzantine Fault Tolerance (BFT) theory or the more recent Nakamoto's longest chain design. Longest chain protocols, designed originally in the Proof-of-Work (PoW)…
Since the inception of Bitcoin, the distributed systems community has shown interest in the design of efficient blockchain systems. However, initial blockchain applications (like Bitcoin) attain very low throughput, which has promoted the…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus is traditionally analyzed under the assumption that all miners incur similar costs per unit of computational effort. In reality, costs vary due to factors such as regional electricity cost differences and…