Related papers: Payment Does Not Imply Consensus (For Distributed …
We give an explicit definition of decentralization and show you that decentralization is almost impossible for the current stage and Bitcoin is the first truly noncentralized currency in the currency history. We propose a new framework of…
Decentralized Ledger Technology, popularized by the Bitcoin network, aims to keep track of a ledger of valid transactions between agents of a virtual economy without a central institution for coordination. In order to keep track of a…
Recently, the blockchain technique was put in the spotlight as it introduced a systematic approach for multiple parties to reach consensus without needing trust. However, the application of this technique in practice is severely restricted…
We argue that recent developments in proof-of-work consensus mechanisms can be used in accordance with advancements in formal verification techniques to build a distributed payment protocol that addresses important economic drawbacks from…
Digital money can be implemented efficiently by avoiding consensus. However, no-consensus implementations have drawbacks, as they cannot support smart contracts, and (even more fundamentally) they cannot deal with conflicting transactions.…
Many blockchain-based algorithms, such as Bitcoin, implement a decentralized asset transfer system, often referred to as a cryptocurrency. As stated in the original paper by Nakamoto, at the heart of these systems lies the problem of…
It is no exaggeration to say that since the introduction of Bitcoin, blockchains have become a disruptive technology that has shaken the world. However, the rising popularity of the paradigm has led to a flurry of proposals addressing…
Censorship resistance with short-term inclusion guarantees is an important feature of decentralized systems, missing from many state-of-the-art and even deployed consensus protocols. In leader-based protocols the leader arbitrarily selects…
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…
Reaching consensus -- a macroscopic state where the system constituents display the same microscopic state -- is a necessity in multiple complex socio-technical and techno-economic systems: their correct functioning ultimately depends on…
Since its advent in 2009, Bitcoin, a cryptography-enabled peer-to-peer digital payment system, has been gaining increasing attention from both academia and industry. An effort designed to overcome a cluster of bottlenecks inherent in…
Bitcoin demonstrated the possibility of a financial ledger that operates without the need for a trusted central authority. However, concerns persist regarding its security and considerable energy consumption. We assess the consensus…
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.…
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…
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,…
Research in the field of blockchain technology and applications is increasing at a fast pace. Although the Bitcoin whitepaper by Nakamoto is already ten years old, the field can still be seen as immature and at an early stage. Current…
Blockchain is a type of decentralized distributed network which acts as an immutable digital ledger. Despite the absence of any central governing authority to validate the blocks in the ledger, it is considered secure and immutable due to…
Blockchain design involves many tradeoffs, and much debate has focused on tradeoffs related to scaling parameters such as blocksize. To address some of the confusion around this subject, we present a probability proof of the DCS Triangle.…
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…
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…