Related papers: Byzantine Generals in the Permissionless Setting
Existing Byzantine fault-tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols address only threshold failures, where the participating nodes fail independently of each other, each one fails equally likely, and the protocol's guarantees follow from a simple…
Blockchain and distributed ledger technologies rely on distributed consensus algorithms. In recent years many consensus algorithms and protocols have been proposed; most of them are for permissioned blockchain networks. However, the…
The concept of distributed consensus originated in the 1970s and gained widespread attention following Leslie Lamport's influential publication on the Byzantine Generals Problem in the 1980s. Over the past five decades, distributed…
Consensus is one of the most fundamental distributed computing problems. In particular, it serves as a building block in many replication based fault-tolerant systems and in particular in multiple recent blockchain solutions. Depending on…
Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) consensus forms the foundation of many modern blockchains striving for both high throughput and low latency. A growing bottleneck is transaction execution and validation on the critical path of consensus,…
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…
Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks.…
Blockchain is a novel technology that is rising a lot of interest in the industrial and re- search sectors because its properties of decentralisation, immutability and data integrity. Initially, the underlying consensus mechanism has been…
The blockchain initially gained traction in 2008 as the technology underlying bitcoin, but now has been employed in a diverse range of applications and created a global market worth over $150B as of 2017. What distinguishes blockchains from…
Despite the popularity and practical applicability of blockchains, there is very limited work on the theoretical foundation of blockchains: The lack of rigorous theory and analysis behind the curtain of blockchains has severely staggered…
Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs), when managed by a few trusted validators, require most but not all of the machinery available in public DLTs. In this work, we explore one possible way to profit from this state of affairs. We devise…
This paper introduces a family of leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocols, built around a metastable mechanism via network subsampling. These protocols provide a strong probabilistic safety guarantee in the presence of Byzantine…
Bitcoin is an immutable permissionless blockchain system that has been extensively used as a public bulletin board by many different applications that heavily relies on its immutability. However, Bitcoin's immutability is not without its…
The widespread adoption of large-scale machine learning models in recent years highlights the need for distributed computing for efficiency and scalability. This work introduces a novel distributed machine learning paradigm --…
Modular methods to transform Byzantine consensus protocols into ones that are fast and communication efficient in the common cases are presented. Small and short protocol segments called layers are custom designed to optimize performance in…
The decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin has experienced great success but also encountered many challenges. One of the challenges has been the long confirmation time. Another challenge is the lack of incentives at certain steps of the…
Blockchain systems benefit from lessons in prior art such as fault tolerance, distributed systems, peer-to-peer systems, and game theory. In this paper we argue that blockchain algorithms should tolerate both rational (self-interested)…
We conduct a systematic study on the light client of permissionless blockchains, in the setting where the full nodes and the light clients are rational. Under such a game-theoretic model, we design a superlight-client protocol to enable a…
The success of blockchains has sparked interest in large-scale deployments of Byzantine fault tolerant (BFT) consensus protocols over wide area networks. A central feature of such networks is variable communication bandwidth across nodes…
The blockchain technology has achieved tremendous success in open (permissionless) decentralized consensus by employing proof-of-work (PoW) or its variants, whereby unauthorized nodes cannot gain disproportionate impact on consensus beyond…