PREStO: A Systematic Framework for Blockchain Consensus Protocols

Abstract

The rapid evolution of the blockchain community has brought together stakeholders from fundamentally different backgrounds: cryptographers, protocol designers, software developers, startup entrepreneurs, corporate executives and investors, academics of various disciplines, and end users. The result is a diverse ecosystem, presently exemplified by the development of a wide range of different blockchain protocols. This raises questions for policy and decision makers: How do different protocols compare? What are their trade-offs? Existing efforts to survey the area reveal a fragmented terminology, and the lack of a unified framework to make the different desirable properties of blockchain protocols explicit.In this paper, we work towards bridging this gap. We evaluate protocols within a five-dimensional design space with the following axes. Optimality: does the protocol achieve its main goals? Stability: are the incentives of its participating agents well-aligned? Efficiency: is its output maximal relative to its use of resources? Robustness: can it cope when its operational assumptions are invalid or perturbed? Persistence: can it recover from catastrophic events? Based on the relevant literature, we organize the properties of existing protocols in subcategories of increasing granularity. The result is a dynamic scheme -termed the PREStO framework. Its scope is to aid the communication between stakeholders of different backgrounds, including managers and investors, and to identify research challenges and opportunities for blockchain protocols in a systematic way. We illustrate this via use cases and make a first step to understand the blockchain ecosystem through a more comprehensive lens.

Semi‐selfish mining based on hidden Markov decision process

“…6 While most of them are opportunistic, who manage to get extra revenues by leveraging the defects of consensus mechanism. 7,8 The classical attacks include selfish mining attacks (SM) and block withhold attacks (BWH). Fortunately, such attacks can hardly sponsored in real blockchain systems due to the requirement of majority power controlled by the attackers.…”

“…Furthermore, mining pools, oriented by some organizations, come into being for the sake of revenues maximization 6 . While most of them are opportunistic, who manage to get extra revenues by leveraging the defects of consensus mechanism 7,8 . The classical attacks include selfish mining attacks (SM) and block withhold attacks (BWH).…”

MBCP: Performance Analysis of Large Scale Mainstream Blockchain Consensus Protocols

“…The PoS based on coinage comes out to be a better alternative to PoW used by earlier Bitcoin implementation due to sound security provisions provided at low transaction fees by this hybrid design, as demonstrated by King et al [20]. To enhance communication among the Blockchain network partners, the PREStO systematic framework has been created [17]. The paper designed a BLOCKBENCH system for the study of private Blockchain performance.…”

“…Besides, it benefits the wealthy, as a miner's likelihood for block mining is linear concerning the computing capabilities owned by that miner. Therefore, another consensus mechanism, PoS, has been proposed [17]. Pseudocode for typical PoW is shown in Fig.…”

On Performance of PBFT Blockchain Consensus Algorithm for IoT-Applications With Constrained Devices

“…It aims to make compromising blockchains a difficult task for a potential attacker [13]. The consensus algorithm is a mechanism for reaching agreement between network users, each of whom is interested only in personal gain and has no reason to trust all other participants [14,15]. In other words, it is the way which the network nodes use to reach agreement on the order and composition of the stored data about the transactions they make.…”