Related papers: Payment Does Not Imply Consensus (For Distributed …
Many large decentralized systems rely on information propagation to ensure their proper function. We examine a common scenario in which only participants that are aware of the information can compete for some reward, and thus informed…
Blockchains are distributed data structures that are used to achieve consensus in systems for cryptocurrencies (like Bitcoin) or smart contracts (like Ethereum). Although blockchains gained a lot of popularity recently, there is no…
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…
Payment channel networks are supposed to overcome technical scalability limitations of blockchain infrastructure by employing a special overlay network with fast payment confirmation and only sporadic settlement of netted transactions on…
The Bitcoin system only provides eventual consistency. For everyday life, the time to confirm a Bitcoin transaction is prohibitively slow. In this paper we propose a new system, built on the Bitcoin blockchain, which enables strong…
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…
We study decentralized cryptocurrency protocols in which the participants do not deplete physical scarce resources. Such protocols commonly rely on Proof of Stake, i.e., on mechanisms that extend voting power to the stakeholders of the…
Blockchain technology promises to democratize finance and promote social equity through decentralization, but questions remain about whether current implementations advance or hinder these goals. Through a mixed-methods study combining…
This paper presents a formal analysis of the Lightning Network as a monetary system structurally diverging from Bitcoin's base-layer settlement model. We demonstrate that under increasing transaction demand, BTC transaction fees rise…
In this work we look at Byzantine consensus in asynchronous systems under the local broadcast model. In the local broadcast model, a message sent by any node is received identically by all of its neighbors in the communication network,…
Public blockchains should be able to scale with respect to the number of nodes and to the transactions workload. The blockchain scalability trilemma has been informally conjectured. This is related to scalability, security and…
Bitcoins and Blockchain technologies are attracting the attention of different scientific communities. In addition, their widespread industrial applications and the continuous introduction of cryptocurrencies are also stimulating the…
Payment channel networks are a highly discussed approach for improving scalability of cryptocurrencies such as Bitcoin. As they allow processing transactions off-chain, payment channel networks are referred to as second layer technology,…
Lower bounds and impossibility results in distributed computing are both intellectually challenging and practically important. Hundreds if not thousands of proofs appear in the literature, but surprisingly, the vast majority of them apply…
Decrits is a cryptocurrency in development that makes use of a novel consensus algorithm that does not require proof-of-work. This paper describes how the Decrits Consensus Algorithm (DCA) is as trustless as a proof-of-work algorithm while…
Classical and contemporary distributed consensus protocols, may they be for binary agreement, state machine replication, or blockchain consensus, require all protocol participants in a peer-to-peer system to agree on exactly the same…
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…
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 --…
We propose a new distributed-computing model, inspired by permissionless distributed systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, that allows studying permissionless consensus in a mathematically regular setting. Like in the sleepy model of Pass…
We consider a prediction market in which all aspects are controlled by market forces, in particular the correct outcomes of events are decided by the market itself rather than by trusted arbiters. This kind of a decentralized prediction…