Related papers: Minotaur: Multi-Resource Blockchain Consensus
Current blockchain consensus protocols -- notably, Proof of Work (PoW) and Proof of Stake (PoS) -- deliver global agreement but exhibit structural constraints. PoW anchors security in heavy computation, inflating energy use and imposing…
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that incentivizes…
A hard-fork reconfiguration of the peer to peer Bitcoin network is described that substitutes tamper-evident logs and proof-of-stake consensus for proof-of-work consensus. The block creation rewards and transaction fees are reallocated to…
The security of blockchain systems based on Proof of Work relies on mining. However, mining suffers from unstable revenue, prompting many miners to form cooperative mining pools. Most existing mining pools operate in a centralized manner,…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular consensus protocol used by Bitcoin since its inception. PoW has the well-known flaw of assigning all the reward to the single miner (or pool) that inserts the new block. This has the consequence of making…
Blockchain technology has become a trusted method for establishing secure and transparent transactions through a distributed, encrypted network. The operation of blockchain is governed by consensus algorithms, among which Proof of Stake…
In blockchain systems, especially cryptographic currencies such as Bitcoin, the double-spending and Byzantine-general-like problem are solved by reaching consensus protocols among all nodes. The state-of-the-art protocols include…
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…
Although proof of work (PoW) consensus dominates the current blockchain-based systems mostly, it has always been criticized for the uneconomic brute-force calculation. As alternatives, energy-conservation and energy-recycling mechanisms…
The consensus protocol is the core of a blockchain system which guarantees its secure and stable operation. Proof of Activity (PoA) is a consensus protocol that tries to address some of the issues pertinent to the most widely used…
In the paper, we present designs for multiple blockchain consensus primitives and a novel blockchain system, all based on the use of trusted execution environments (TEEs), such as Intel SGX-enabled CPUs. First, we show how using TEEs for…
The consensus protocol is a critical component of distributed ledgers and blockchains. Achieving consensus over a decentralized network poses challenges to transaction finality and performance. Currently, the highest-performing consensus…
Proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrencies rely on a balance of security and fairness in order to maintain a sustainable ecosystem of miners and users. Users demand fast and consistent transaction confirmation, and in exchange drive the adoption…
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…
Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, while central to achieving decentralized consensus, has long been criticized for excessive energy use and hardware inefficiencies \cite{devries2018bitcoin, truby2018decarbonizing}. This paper…
Proof of Stake (PoS) blockchains offer promising alternatives to traditional Proof of Work (PoW) systems, providing scalability and energy efficiency. However, blockchains operate in a decentralized manner and the network is composed of…
The success of blockchain as the underlying technology for cryptocurrencies has opened up possibilities for its use in other application domains as well. The main advantages of blockchain for its potential use in other domains are its…
This paper opts to mitigate the energy-inefficiency of the Blockchain Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus algorithm by rationally repurposing the power spent during the mining process. The original PoW mining scheme is designed to consider one…
Currently there exist many blockchains with weak trust guarantees, limiting applications and participation. Existing solutions to boost the trust using a stronger blockchain, e.g., via checkpointing, requires the weaker blockchain to give…
As cross-chain technologies make the interactions among different blockchains (hereinafter "chains") possible, multi-chains consensus is becoming more and more important in blockchain networks. However, more attention has been paid to the…