Related papers: Longest Chain Consensus Under Bandwidth Constraint
Consensus is arguably one of the most important notions in distributed computing. Among asynchronous, randomized, and signature-free implementations, the protocols of Most\'efaoui et al. (PODC 2014 and JACM 2015) represent a landmark…
Crosschain communications allows information to be communicated between blockchains. Consensus in the context of crosschain communications relates to how participants on one blockchain are convinced of the state of a remote blockchain. It…
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…
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…
The performance of existing permissionless smart contract platforms such as Ethereum is limited by the consensus layer. Prism is a new proof-of-work consensus protocol that provably achieves throughput and latency up to physical limits…
Nodes in the Lightning Network synchronise routing information through a gossip protocol that makes use of a staggered broadcast mechanism. In this work, we show that the convergence delay in the network is larger than what would be…
We consider \emph{plurality consensus} in a network of $n$ nodes. Initially, each node has one of $k$ opinions. The nodes execute a (randomized) distributed protocol to agree on the plurality opinion (the opinion initially supported by the…
With the increasing demand for communication between blockchains, improving the performance of cross-chain communication protocols becomes an emerging challenge. We take a first step towards analyzing the limitations of cross-chain…
The blocks in the Bitcoin blockchain record the amount of work W that went into creating them through proofs of work. When honest parties control a majority of the work, consensus is achieved by picking the chain with the highest recorded…
We present an algorithm for synchronous deterministic Byzantine consensus, tolerant to links failures and links asynchrony. It cares for a class of networks with specific needs, where both safety and liveness are essential, and timely…
With the advent of blockchain technology, the number of proposals has boomed. The network traffic imposed by these blockchain proposals increases the cost of hosting nodes. Unfortunately, as of today, we are not aware of any comparative…
Bitcoin uses blockchain technology and proof-of-work (PoW) mechanism where nodes spend computing resources and earn rewards in return for spending these resources. This incentive system has caused power to be significantly biased towards a…
Light clients, also known as Simple Payment Verification (SPV) clients, are nodes which only download a small portion of the data in a blockchain, and use indirect means to verify that a given chain is valid. Typically, instead of…
In the proof-of-stake (PoS) paradigm for maintaining decentralized, permissionless cryptocurrencies, Sybil attacks are prevented by basing the distribution of roles in the protocol execution on the stake distribution recorded in the ledger…
Bitcoin is the first secure decentralized electronic currency system. However, it is known to be inefficient due to its proof-of-work (PoW) consensus algorithm and has the potential hazard of double spending. In this paper, we aim to reduce…
We develop a continuous-time control approach to optimal trading in a Proof-of-Stake (PoS) blockchain, formulated as a consumption-investment problem that aims to strike the optimal balance between a participant's (or agent's) utility from…
Consensus mechanism is the core technology for blockchain to ensure that transactions are executed in sequence. It also determines the decentralization, security, and efficiency of blockchain. Existing mechanisms all have certain…
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…
Cryptocurrency exchanges use proofs of liabilities (PoLs) to prove to their customers their liabilities committed on-chain, thereby enhancing their trust in the service. Unfortunately, a close examination of currently deployed and academic…
We present a novel framework for analyzing blockchain consensus mechanisms by modeling blockchain growth as a Partially Observable Stochastic Game (POSG) which we reduce to a set of Partially Observable Markov Decision Processes (POMDPs)…