Related papers: Quick Order Fairness
Most online lotteries today fail to ensure the verifiability of the random process and rely on a trusted third party. This issue has received little attention since the emergence of distributed protocols like Bitcoin that demonstrated the…
Blockchain networks are facing increasingly heterogeneous computational demands, and in response, protocol designers have started building specialized infrastructure to supply that demand. This paper introduces Resonance: a new kind of…
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…
Reliable broadcast is a fundamental primitive, widely used as a building block for data replication in distributed systems. Informally, it ensures that system members deliver the same values, even in the presence of equivocating Byzantine…
Streamlined Byzantine Fault Tolerant (BFT) protocols, such as HotStuff [PODC'19], and weighted voting represent two possible strategies to improve consensus in the distributed systems world. Several studies have been conducted on both…
Motivated, in part, by the rise of permissionless systems such as Bitcoin where arbitrary nodes (whose identities are not known apriori) can join and leave at will, we extend established research in scalable Byzantine agreement to a more…
We describe a plausible probabilistic model for a blockchain queueing environment in which rational, profit-maximising schedulers impose adversarial disciplines on incoming messages containing a payload that encodes a state transition in a…
Despite being under development for over 15 years, transaction throughput remains one of the key challenges confronting blockchains, which typically has a cap of a limited number of transactions per second. A fundamental factor limiting…
The development of blockchain technologies has enabled the trustless execution of so-called smart contracts, i.e. programs that regulate the exchange of assets (e.g., cryptocurrency) between users. In a decentralized blockchain, the state…
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…
This paper introduces a deterministic Byzantine consensus algorithm that relies on a new weak coordinator. As opposed to previous algorithms that cannot terminate in the presence of a faulty or slow coordinator, our algorithm can terminate…
Distributing quantum correlations to each node of a network is a key aspect of quantum networking. Here, we present a robust, physically motivated protocol by which global quantum correlations, as characterized by the discord, can be…
Payment channel is a class of techniques designed to solve the scalability problem of blockchain. By establishing channels off the blockchain to form payment channel networks (PCNs), users can make instant payments without interacting with…
Consider a university assigning students to courses and dorms. While many mechanisms are available, they each have their own drawbacks. Running serial dictatorship once for all goods is highly unfair, but running serial dictatorship…
It has recently been shown that, contrarily to a common belief, money transfer in the presence of faulty (Byzantine) processes does not require strong agreement such as consensus. This article goes one step further: namely, it first…
Coin flipping is a cryptographic primitive in which two spatially separated players, who in principle do not trust each other, wish to establish a common random bit. If we limit ourselves to classical communication, this task requires…
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…
Many decision processes run for a long and unknown duration: in each round new requests arrive, an irrevocable choice must be made immediately, and the system is judged by ongoing fairness requirements. Examples include food banks…
The performance of existing coded caching schemes is sensitive to the worst channel quality, a problem which is exacerbated when communicating over fading channels. In this paper, we address this limitation in the following manner: in…
In the Internet of Things (IoT) domain, devices need a platform to transact seamlessly without a trusted intermediary. Although Distributed Ledger Technologies (DLTs) could provide such a platform, blockchains, such as Bitcoin, were not…