A Better Method to Analyze Blockchain Consistency

Kiffer, Lucianna; Rajaraman, Rajmohan; Shelat, Abhi

doi:10.1145/3243734.3243814

Cited by 117 publications

(131 citation statements)

References 9 publications

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“…Kiffer and Rajaraman [50] provided a simple framework of Markov processes for analyzing consistency properties of the blockchain protocols, and used some numerical experiments to check the consensus bounds for network delay parameters and adversarial computing percentages. Huang et al [41] set up a Markov process with an absorbing state to analyze performance measures of the Raft consensus algorithm for a private blockchain.…”

Section: Markov Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Markov processes in blockchain systems

Chang

et al. 2019

Comput Soc Netw

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In this paper, we develop a more general framework of block-structured Markov processes in the queueing study of blockchain systems, which can provide analysis both for the stationary performance measures and for the sojourn times of any transaction or block. Note that an original aim of this paper is to generalize the two-stage batchservice queueing model studied in Li et al. [56] both "from exponential to phase-type" service times and "from Poisson to MAP" transaction arrivals. In general, the MAP transaction arrivals and the two stages of PH service times make our blockchain queue more suitable to various practical conditions of blockchain systems with crucial factors, for example, the mining processes, the block-generations, the blockchain-building and so forth. For such a more general blockchain queueing model, we focus on two basic research aspects: (1) By using the matrix-geometric solution, we first obtain a sufficient stable condition of the blockchain system. Then we provide simple expressions for the average stationary number of transactions in the queueing waiting room, and the average stationary number of transactions in the block. (2) However, comparing with Li et al. [56], analysis of the transaction-confirmation time becomes very difficult and challenging due to the complicated blockchain structure. To overcome the difficulties, we develop a computational technique of the first passage times by means of both the PH distributions of infinite sizes and the RG-factorizations. Finally, we hope that the methodology and results given in this paper will open a new avenue to queueing analysis of more general blockchain systems in practice, and can motivate a series of promising future research on development of blockchain technologies. 1

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Section: Markov Processesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Markov processes in blockchain systems

Chang

et al. 2019

Comput Soc Netw

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“…A complicated analysis with strong assumptions [4] showed that the blockchain growth theorem, the blockchain quality theorem, and the common prefix theorem remain valid under the non-lockstep synchrony model. Reference [5] also reasoned the consistency of bitcoin protocol using the Markov chains, although their result has a non-closed form.…”

Section: A the Bitcoin Backbone Protocolmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…The intuition is that under typical event, an honest miner's blockchain grow by at least X[s + ∆, t − ∆] according to Lemma 17. Meanwhile, the number of adversarial blocks mined is upper bounded by (5). Thus, at least certain fraction of blocks must be honest even in the worst case that all adversarial blocks are included in the blockchain.…”

Section: Definition 13 (Typical Event)mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

On Analysis of the Bitcoin and Prism Backbone Protocols in Synchronous Networks

Guo

2019

2019 57th Annual Allerton Conference on Communication, Control, and Computing (Allerton)

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Bitcoin is a peer-to-peer payment system proposed by Nakamoto in 2008. Based on the Nakamoto consensus, Bagaria, Kannan, Tse, Fanti, and Viswanath proposed the Prism protocol in 2018 and showed that it achieves near-optimal blockchain throughput while maintaining similar level of security as bitcoin.This work provides the probabilistic guarantees for the liveliness and consistency of bitcoin and Prism transactions. Previous analyses of the bitcoin and Prism have been either established under a simplified discrete-time model or expressed in terms of exponential order result. This paper presents a streamlined and strengthened analysis under a more realistic continuous-time model where the block propagation delays are heterogeneous, arbitrary, and upper bounded by some constant. The goal is to show that every valid transaction becomes permanent in all honest miners' blockchains under a certain "typical event", which occurs with probability close to 1. To that end, we establish the blockchain growth theorem, the blockchain quality theorem, and the common prefix theorem. In lieu of exponential order result in the literature, the probabilistic guarantees for the desired properties of the bitcoin and Prism protocols take the form of explicit expressions here, which provide improved design references for public transaction ledger protocols.

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“…Assuming a subchain of blocks (e.g., 6 blocks 1 ), a diet node can increase its trust in B k by ver-ifying the correctness of the subchain (B k− +1 , ..., B k ) to ensure that none of these blocks have been counterfeited. While a block is already costly to create for an attacker, a subchain of blocks is exponentially more costly to counterfeit [6]; verifying that they are all correct can exponentially increase the trust a diet node has in B k therefore drawing its trust in B k much closer to that of a full node.…”

Section: Enabling Block and Subchain Verificationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dietcoin

et al. 2019

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Distributed ledgers are among the most replicated data repositories in the world. They offer data consistency, immutability, and auditability, based on the assumption that each participating node locally verifies their entire content. Although their content, currently extending up to a few hundred gigabytes, can be accommodated by dedicated commodity hard disks, downloading it, processing it, and storing it in general-purpose desktop and laptop computers can prove largely impractical. Even worse, this becomes a prohibitive restriction for smartphones, mobile devices, and resource-constrained IoT devices. In this demo, we present an implementation of Dietcoin, a Bitcoin protocol extension that allows nodes to perform secure local verification of Bitcoin transactions with small bandwidth and storage requirements. This demo presents and benchmarks the main features of Dietcoin that are important for today's cryptocurrencies and smart contract systems, but are missing in the current state-of-the-art: (i) allowing resource-constrained devices to verify the correctness of selected blocks locally without having to download the complete ledger; (ii) enabling devices to join a blockchain quickly yet securely, dropping bootstrap time from days down to a matter of seconds; (iii) providing a generic solution that can be applied to other distributed ledgers secured with Proof-of-Work.

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A Better Method to Analyze Blockchain Consistency

Cited by 117 publications

References 9 publications

Markov processes in blockchain systems

Markov processes in blockchain systems

On Analysis of the Bitcoin and Prism Backbone Protocols in Synchronous Networks

Dietcoin

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