Name
Abstract | ||
|---|---|---|
Nakamoto consensus underlies the security of many of the world's largest cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum. Common lore is that Nakamoto consensus only achieves consistency and liveness under a regime where the difficulty of its underlying mining puzzle is very high, negatively impacting overall throughput and latency. In this work, we study Nakamoto consensus under a wide range of puzzle difficulties, including very easy puzzles. We first analyze an adversary-free setting and show that, surprisingly, the common prefix of the blockchain grows quickly even with easy puzzles. In a setting with adversaries, we provide a small backwards-compatible change to Nakamoto consensus to achieve consistency and liveness with easy puzzles. Our insight relies on a careful choice of \emph{symmetry-breaking strategy}, which was significantly underestimated in prior work. We introduce a new method -- \emph{coalescing random walks} -- to analyzing the correctness of Nakamoto consensus under the uniformly-at-random symmetry-breaking strategy. This method is more powerful than existing analysis methods that focus on bounding the number of {\it convergence opportunities}. |
Year | DOI | Venue |
|---|---|---|
2021 | 10.4230/LIPIcs.DISC.2021.39 | DISC |
DocType | Citations | PageRank |
Conference | 0 | 0.34 |
References | Authors | |
0 | 3 | |
Name | Order | Citations | PageRank |
|---|---|---|---|
| Lili Su | 1 | 60 | 7.82 |
| Quanquan Liu | 2 | 7 | 7.90 |
| Neha Narula | 3 | 224 | 13.66 |