Related papers: The Economic Limits of Permissionless Consensus
Blockchain protocols typically aspire to run in the permissionless setting, in which nodes are owned and operated by a large number of diverse and unknown entities, with each node free to start or stop running the protocol at any time. This…
The core premise of permissionless blockchains is their reliable and secure operation without the need to trust any individual agent. At the heart of blockchain consensus mechanisms is an explicit cost (whether work or stake) for…
Blockchain technology enables stakeholders to conduct trusted data sharing and exchange without a trusted centralized institution. These features make blockchain applications attractive to enhance trustworthiness in very different contexts.…
Bitcoin demonstrated the possibility of a financial ledger that operates without the need for a trusted central authority. However, concerns persist regarding its security and considerable energy consumption. We assess the consensus…
Blockchain is a novel technology that is rising a lot of interest in the industrial and re- search sectors because its properties of decentralisation, immutability and data integrity. Initially, the underlying consensus mechanism has been…
This paper presents the first generic compiler that transforms any permissioned consensus protocol into a proof-of-stake permissionless consensus protocol. For each of the following properties, if the initial permissioned protocol satisfies…
We study distributed computation in synchronous dynamic networks where an omniscient adversary controls the unidirectional communication links. Its behavior is modeled as a sequence of directed graphs representing the active (i.e. timely)…
We propose a new distributed-computing model, inspired by permissionless distributed systems such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, that allows studying permissionless consensus in a mathematically regular setting. Like in the sleepy model of Pass…
Blockchain consensus is a state whereby each node in a network agrees on the current state of the blockchain. Existing protocols achieve consensus via a contest or voting procedure to select one node as a dictator to propose new blocks.…
This paper addresses the problem of resilient consensus in the presence of misbehaving nodes. Although it is typical to assume knowledge of at least some nonlocal information when studying secure and fault-tolerant consensus algorithms,…
Consensus is fundamental for distributed systems since it underpins key functionalities of such systems ranging from distributed information fusion, decision-making, to decentralized control. In order to reach an agreement, existing…
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…
Inspired by distributed resource allocation problems in dynamic topology networks, we initiate the study of distributed consensus with finite messaging passing. We first find a sufficient condition on the network graph for which no…
Ensuring the correctness of distributed system implementations remains a challenging and largely unaddressed problem. In this paper we present a protocol that can be used to certify the safety of consensus implementations. Our proposed…
The blockchain technology enables mutually untrusting participants to reach consensus on the state of a distributed and decentralized ledger (called a blockchain) in a permissionless setting. The consensus protocol of the blockchain imposes…
Distributed consensus protocols provide a mechanism for spreading information within clustered networks, allowing agents and clusters to make decisions without requiring direct access to the state of the ensemble. In this work, we propose a…
In this paper we consider a network of processors aiming at cooperatively solving linear programming problems subject to uncertainty. Each node only knows a common cost function and its local uncertain constraint set. We propose a…
Permissionless consensus protocols require a scarce resource to regulate leader election and provide Sybil resistance. Existing paradigms such as Proof of Work and Proof of Stake instantiate this scarcity through parallelizable resources…
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…
A typical blockchain protocol uses consensus to make sure that mutually mistrusting users agree on the order in which their operations on shared data are executed. However, it is known that asset transfer systems, by far the most popular…