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Consensus on Demand

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Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS 2022)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNCS,volume 13751))

Abstract

Digital money can be implemented efficiently by avoiding consensus. However, no-consensus designs are fundamentally limited, as they cannot support general smart contracts, and similarly they cannot deal with conflicting transactions.

We present a novel protocol that combines the benefits of an asynchronous, broadcast-based digital currency, with the capacity to perform consensus. This is achieved by selectively performing consensus a posteriori, i.e., only when absolutely necessary. Our on-demand consensus comes at the price of restricting the Byzantine participants to be less than a one-fifth minority in the system, which is the optimal threshold.

We formally prove the correctness of our system and present an open-source implementation, which inherits many features from the Ethereum ecosystem.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Jakub Sliwinski, Yann Vonlanthen & Roger Wattenhofer

Authors
  1. Jakub Sliwinski
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  2. Yann Vonlanthen
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  3. Roger Wattenhofer
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Yann Vonlanthen .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of Picardie Jules Verne, Amiens, France

    Stéphane Devismes

  2. Sorbonne University, Paris, France

    Franck Petit

  3. Grenoble Alpes University, Saint-Martin-d'Hères, France

    Karine Altisen

  4. Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Giuseppe Antonio Di Luna

  5. IMDEA Networks Institute, Madrid, Spain

    Antonio Fernandez Anta

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Sliwinski, J., Vonlanthen, Y., Wattenhofer, R. (2022). Consensus on Demand. In: Devismes, S., Petit, F., Altisen, K., Di Luna, G.A., Fernandez Anta, A. (eds) Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems. SSS 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13751. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21017-4_20

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-21017-4_20

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-031-21016-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-031-21017-4

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