A brief survey of Cryptocurrency systems

Mukhopadhyay, Ujan; Skjellum, Anthony; Hambolu, Oluwakemi; Oakley, Jon; Yu, Lu; Brooks, Richard

doi:10.1109/pst.2016.7906988

Cited by 240 publications

(125 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…Bitcoin is essentially a protocol for reaching consensus on a chronologically ordered log of transactions called a blockchain. This data structure is now a cornerstone of many other Distributed Ledger Technologies, or DLTs for short, [2], [3], [4], [5]. Blockchain based DLTs are finding applications in other fields, ranging from financial services such as digital assets, remittance, and online payments to smart contracts, public services, reputation systems, and data marketplaces [6].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Properties of the Tangle for Uniform Random and Random Walk Tip Selection

Kuśmierz¹,

Sanders²,

Penzkofer³

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)

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The growing number of applications for distributed ledger technologies is driving both industry and academia to solve the limitations of blockchain, particularly its scalability issues. Recent distributed ledger technologies have replaced the blockchain linear structure with a more flexible directed acyclic graph in an attempt to accommodate a higher throughput. Despite the fast-growing diffusion of directed acyclic graph based distributed ledger technologies, researchers lack a basic understanding of their behavior. In this paper we analyze the Tangle, a directed acyclic graph that is used (with certain modifications) in various protocols such as IOTA, Byteball, Avalanche or SPECTRE.Our contribution is threefold. First, we run simulations in a continuous-time model to examine tip count stability and cumulative weight evolution while varying the rate of incoming transactions. In particular we confirm analytical predictions on the number of tips with uniform random tip selection strategy. Second, we show how different tip selection algorithms affect the growth of the Tangle. Moreover, we explain these differences by analyzing the spread of exit probabilities of random walks. Our findings confirm analytically derived predictions and provide novel insights on the different phases of growth of cumulative weight as well as on the average time difference for a transaction to receive its first approval when using distinct tip selection algorithms. Lastly, we analyze simulation overhead and performance as a function of Tangle size and compare results for different tip selection algorithms.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Properties of the Tangle for Uniform Random and Random Walk Tip Selection

Kuśmierz¹,

Sanders²,

Penzkofer³

et al. 2019

2019 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)

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“…In the dominant operational cryptocurrency systems [16,51], the subsidy is the substantial part of the incentive as of today. And indeed, despite the breadth of research on blockchain security [14,20,50,61], and despite the significance of incentives for blockchain security, most prior work studied the incentives scheme when the reward comes only from subsidy [29,31,33,44,53,58,60]. However, as a cryptocurrency gains traction, the incoming load of transactions increases [12,28].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Gap Game

Tsabary

Eyal

2018

Proceedings of the 2018 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security

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Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies secure a decentralized consensus protocol by incentives. The protocol participants, called miners, generate (mine) a series of blocks, each containing monetary transactions created by system users. As incentive for participation, miners receive newly minted currency and transaction fees paid by transaction creators. Blockchain bandwidth limits lead users to pay increasing fees in order to prioritize their transactions. However, most prior work focused on models where fees are negligible. In a notable exception, Carlsten et al. [17] postulated that if incentives come only from fees then a mining gap would form -miners would avoid mining when the available fees are insufficient.In this work, we analyze cryptocurrency security in realistic settings, taking into account all elements of expenses and rewards. To study when gaps form, we analyze the system as a game we call the gap game. We analyze the game with a combination of symbolic and numeric analysis tools in a wide range of scenarios.Our analysis confirms Carlsten et al. 's postulate; indeed, we show that gaps form well before fees are the only incentive, and analyze the implications on security. Perhaps surprisingly, we show that different miners choose different gap sizes to optimize their utility, even when their operating costs are identical. Alarmingly, we see that the system incentivizes large miner coalitions, reducing system decentralization. We describe the required conditions to avoid the incentive misalignment, providing guidelines for future cryptocurrency design. CCS CONCEPTS• Security and privacy → Distributed systems security; Security protocols; Economics of security and privacy; • Computer systems organization → Peer-to-peer architectures;

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“…While there has been a lot of attention towards the blockchain technology, there are relatively few surveys conducted in this area. These survyes can be classified into one of the 3 categories: 1) applications [5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13], 2) privacy issues and security threats [14][15][16], and 3) consensus protocols [1,[17][18][19].…”

Section: Related Surveysmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For consensus protocols, Mukhopadhyay et al [17] surveys the mining techniques in consensus protocols used by the different cryptocurrencies. Zheng et al conducted a survey of 6 consensus protocols [1] presenting their limitations in terms of scalability, privacy, and selfish mining for bitcoins.…”

Section: Related Surveysmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Review of Blockchain Architecture and Consensus Protocols: Use Cases, Challenges, and Solutions

Ismail¹,

Materwala²

2019

Preprint

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Over the last decade the blockchain technology has emerged to provide solutions to the complexity and privacy challenges of using distributed databases. Its adoption is motivated by cost reduction for customers. Over this time, the concept of blockchain has shifted greatly due to its potential in business growth for enterprises and the rapidly evolving applications in a collaborative smart cities ecosystem, healthcare, and governance. Many platforms, with different architectures and consensus protocols, have been introduced. Consequently, it becomes challenging for an application developer to chose the right platform. Furthermore, blockchain has misaligned with the goals for efficient green collaborative digital ecosystem. Therefore, it becomes critical to address this gap and to build new frameworks to align blockchain with those goals. In this paper, we discuss the evolution of blockchain architecture and consensus protocols, bringing a retrospective analysis and discussing the rationale of the evolution of the various architectures and protocols, as well as capturing the assumptions conducting to their development and contributions to building collaborative applications. We introduce a classification of those architectures, helping developers to chose a suitable platform for applications and providing insights for future research directions in the field in building new frameworks. blockchain architecture and consensus protocol, it becomes more and more difficult to foresee the uses and applications of blockchain, therefore compounding the difficulty in achieving the goals. In 2017, the bitcoin mining used around 30.14 TerraWatt hours (TWh) of energy, which is equivalent to energy usage of the entire Ireland in a year [3]. According to a research, the annual carbon dioxide emissions by the bitcoin network are as high as 22.9 million metric tons, almost equivalent to the amount produced by the countries like Sri Lanka and Jordan [4].Further challenges have been placed on distributed applications by the expanding industrial market growth to serve a wide number of customers. Growing business requires trust and transparency between the customers and business providers. Customers require to eliminate intermediaries to reduce transactions cost. The issues of data communication overhead with increasing number of network participants further hinders the real-time services of the developed applications. Addressing these problems of energy consumption and scalability often trades off with security, and privacy. As such, the goals of this paper are four-fold: 1) we aim to provide a temporal evolution of blockchain applications development platforms architectures and consensus protocols with a retrospective analysis to their introduction. We classify the platforms and the consensus protocols under unifying architectures, and discuss various existing and upcoming blockchain applications, 2) help developers to choose the right platform architecture for applications, 3) we evaluate the current research on the topic, blockchai...

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A brief survey of Cryptocurrency systems

Cited by 240 publications

References 8 publications

Properties of the Tangle for Uniform Random and Random Walk Tip Selection

Properties of the Tangle for Uniform Random and Random Walk Tip Selection

The Gap Game

A Review of Blockchain Architecture and Consensus Protocols: Use Cases, Challenges, and Solutions

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