Related papers: LightSync: Ultra Light Client for PoW Blockchains
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…
Validating a blockchain incurs heavy computation, communication, and storage costs. As a result, clients with limited resources, called light nodes, cannot verify transactions independently and must trust full nodes, making them vulnerable…
Blockchain applications often rely on lightweight clients to access and verify on-chain data efficiently without the need to run a resource-intensive full node. These light clients must maintain robust security to protect the blockchain's…
Blockchain protocols are based on a distributed database where stored data is guaranteed to be immutable. The requirement that all nodes have to maintain their own local copy of the database ensures security while consensus mechanisms help…
Lazy blockchains decouple consensus from transaction verification and execution to increase throughput. Although they can contain invalid transactions (e.g., double spends) as a result, these can easily be filtered out by full nodes that…
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…
Light clients are gaining increasing attention in the literature since they obviate the need for users to set up dedicated blockchain full nodes. While the literature features a number of light client instantiations, most light client…
Lightweight Bitcoin clients execute a Simple Payment Verification (SPV) protocol to verify the validity of transactions related to a particular user. Currently, lightweight clients use Bloom filters to significantly reduce the amount of…
This paper presents a mathematically rigorous formal analysis of Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) clients, as specified in Section 8 of the original Bitcoin white paper, versus non-mining full nodes operated by home users. It defines…
Blockchains are among the most powerful technologies to realize decentralized information systems. In order to safely enjoy all guarantees provided by a blockchain, one should maintain a full node, therefore maintaining an updated local…
Public blockchains provide a decentralized method for storing transaction data and have many applications in different sectors. In order for users to track transactions, a simple method is to let them keep a local copy of the entire public…
A blockchain is a decentralized ledger where all transactions are recorded. For having a reliable blockchain and double-spending prevention, we need a decentralized consensus and agreement on a blockchain. Bitcoin uses proof-of-work (PoW).…
Permissionless blockchains such as Bitcoin have long been criticized for their high computational and storage overhead. Unfortunately, while a number of proposals address the energy consumption of existing Proof-of-Work deployments, little…
Bitcoin is the first fully-decentralized permissionless blockchain protocol to achieve a high level of security, but at the expense of poor throughput and latency. Scaling the performance of Bitcoin has a been a major recent direction of…
Light clients are essential for scalable blockchain systems because they verify data availability without downloading full blocks. In data availability sampling based systems, sampled cells are retrieved from a peer-to-peer network and…
This paper presents a complete formal specification, protocol description, and mathematical proof structure for Simplified Payment Verification (SPV) as originally defined in the Bitcoin whitepaper \cite{nakamoto2008}. In stark contrast to…
Blockchain stores information into a chain of "blocks", whose integrity is usually guaranteed by Proof of Work (PoW). In many blockchain applications (including cryptocurrencies), users compete with each other to win the ownership of the…
As an append-only distributed database, blockchain is utilized in a vast variety of applications including the cryptocurrency and Internet-of-Things (IoT). The existing blockchain solutions have downsides in communication and storage…
A blockchain and smart contract enabled security mechanism for IoT applications has been reported recently for urban, financial, and network services. However, due to the power-intensive and a low-throughput consensus mechanism in existing…
Micropayment channels are the most prominent solution to the limitation on transaction throughput in current blockchain systems. However, in practice channels are risky because participants have to be online constantly to avoid fraud, and…