Related papers: POEM: Proof of Entropy Minima
Blockchains based on the celebrated Nakamoto consensus protocol have shown promise in several applications, including cryptocurrencies. However, these blockchains have inherent scalability limits caused by the protocol's consensus…
Nakamoto consensus underlies the security of many of the world's largest cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Common lore is that Nakamoto consensus only achieves consistency and liveness under a regime where the difficulty of…
Designing an efficient difficulty control algorithm is an essential problem in Proof-of-Work (PoW) based blockchains because the network hash rate is randomly changing. This paper proposes a general difficulty control algorithm and provides…
The Nakamoto consensus protocol underlying the Bitcoin blockchain uses proof of work as a voting mechanism. Honest miners who contribute hashing power towards securing the chain try to extend the longest chain they are aware of. Despite its…
Following the design of more efficient blockchain consensus algorithms, the execution layer has emerged as the new performance bottleneck of blockchains, especially under high contention. Current parallel execution frameworks either rely on…
Ethereum 2.0, as the preeminent smart contract blockchain platform, guarantees the precise execution of applications without third-party intervention. At its core, this system leverages the Proof-of-Stake (PoS) consensus mechanism, which…
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…
Mixtures of Hidden Markov Models (MHMMs) are frequently used for clustering of sequential data. An important aspect of MHMMs, as of any clustering approach, is that they can be interpretable, allowing for novel insights to be gained from…
The blockchain data structure maintained via the longest-chain rule---popularized by Bitcoin---is a powerful algorithmic tool for consensus algorithms. Such algorithms achieve consistency for blocks in the chain as a function of their depth…
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 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)…
Consensus protocols play a pivotal role to balance security and efficiency in blockchain systems. In this paper, we propose an evaluation framework for blockchain consensus protocols termed as AlphaBlock. In this framework, we compare the…
Transaction throughput, confirmation latency and confirmation reliability are fundamental performance measures of any blockchain system in addition to its security. In a decentralized setting, these measures are limited by two underlying…
The exponential growth of the blockchain size has become a major contributing factor that hinders the decentralisation of blockchain and its potential implementations in data-heavy applications. In this paper, we propose segment blockchain,…
In this paper we present the initial design of Minerva consensus protocol for Truechain and other technical details. Currently, it is widely believed in the blockchain community that a public chain cannot simultaneously achieve high…
It has been known for some time that the Nakamoto consensus as implemented in the Bitcoin protocol is not totally aligned with the individual interests of the participants. More precisely, it has been shown that block withholding mining…
Decentralization is a foundational principle of permissionless blockchains, with consensus mechanisms serving a critical role in its realization. This study quantifies the decentralization of consensus mechanisms in proof-of-stake (PoS)…
Formal analyses of blockchain protocols have received much attention recently. Consistency results of Nakamoto's blockchain protocol are often expressed in a quantity $c$, which denotes the expected number of network delays before some…
Extensive research on Nakamoto-style consensus protocols has shown that network delays degrade the security of these protocols. Established results indicate that, perhaps surprisingly, maximal security is achieved when the network is as…
Though voting-based consensus algorithms in Blockchain outperform proof-based ones in energy- and transaction-efficiency, they are prone to incur wrong elections and bribery elections. The former originates from the uncertainties of…