Bitcoin meets strong consistency

Abstract

Abstract-The Bitcoin system only provides eventual consistency. For everyday life, the time to confirm a Bitcoin transaction is prohibitively slow. In this paper we propose a new system, built on the Bitcoin blockchain, which enables strong consistency. Our system, PeerCensus, acts as a certification authority, manages peer identities in a peer-to-peer network, and ultimately enhances Bitcoin and similar systems with strong consistency. Our extensive analysis shows that PeerCensus is in a secure state with high probability. We also show how Discoin, a Bitcoin variant that decouples block creation and transaction confirmation, can be built on top of PeerCensus, enabling real-time payments. Unlike Bitcoin, once transactions in Discoin are committed, they stay committed.

Bonded Mining: Difficulty Adjustment by Miner Commitment

“…We do not intend our work to be a replacement for PoS, but note that Bonded Mining similarly provides a fixed set of consensus participants that in our case are validated by PoW. For hybrids of PoW/PoS and hybrids of PoW/BFT [9,19], Bonded Mining can bolster the performance of the PoW component.…”

Handling bitcoin conflicts through a glimpse of structure

“…Several attempts to fix it have been published, using a leader [9,11,18], or forming local committees to run consensus algorithms at the local level [20] but these proposals encounter various scalability or security issues which make them unusable. Specifically, Bitcoin-NG [11], PeerCensus [9], and BizCoin [18] have proposed to rely exclusively on miners to take in charge the full process of validation and confirmation to guarantee that all the operations triggered on the transactions are atomically consistent. In all these protocols, time is divided into epochs.…”

“…The root cause of Bitcoin's vulnerability to such attacks is the absence of consistency between Bitcoin operations. Three recent works [9,11,18] have proposed to rely exclusively on miners to take in charge the full process of validation and confirmation to guarantee that all the operations triggered on the transactions and on the blockchain are atomically consistent. Beyond the complexity introduced by these approaches, all important decisions of Bitcoin are put solely under the responsibility of (a quorum of) miners, and the membership of the quorum is decided by the quorum members, which magnifies the power of malicious miners [3].…”

Brief Announcement Blockguard: Adaptive Blockchain Security

“…There are plenty of studies enhancing the scalability of proof-of-work networks [4,7,9,11,13,18,21,22] , optimizing membership maintenance of the coordinated consensus schemes or joining the two approaches [20]. Ultimately, the scalability of both coordinated consensus and proof-of-work networks is limited by the need to broadcast the information to all peers.…”