ABSTRACT
It has been well recognized that traditional blockchains have limited throughput. It is intuitive to achieve higher throughput by increasing the block size and shortening the block interval. In this paper, we study the security implications on doing so, and define the boundary for acceptable block sizes and block intervals. We define the security of the blockchain in terms of the stale block rate in the network and carry out an empirical study using a blockchain simulator to find the optimal block parameters (i.e., size and interval). We show that it is possible to achieve sufficiently high throughput for a blockchain platform to be used for activities beyond cryptocurrency, such as state-level electronic voting.
- Nakamoto, S. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. http://www.bitcoin.org.Google Scholar
- Zhao, W., Yang, S., & Luo, X. (2019, March). On Consensus in Public Blockchains. In Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Blockchain Technology (Honolulu, Hawaii, USA, March 2019). ACM, 1--5.Google Scholar
- Zhao, W. 2014. Building dependable distributed systems. John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
- Zhao, W., Melliar-Smith, P. M., & Moser, L. E. 2012. Low latency fault tolerance system. The Computer Journal, 56, 6 (June 2012), 716--740.Google Scholar
- Castro, M., & Liskov, B. 2002. Practical Byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems 20, 4 (Nov. 2002), 398--461.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zhao, W. 2016. Optimistic byzantine fault tolerance. International Journal of Parallel, Emergent and Distributed Systems 31, 3 (2016), 254--267.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zhao, W. 2014. Application-aware byzantine fault tolerance. In Proceedings of the IEEE 12th International Conference on Dependable, Autonomic and Secure Computing (Dalian, China, August 24-27, 2014). IEEE, 45--50.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Babi, M., & Zhao, W. 2017. Towards Trustworthy Collaborative Editing. Computers 6, 2 (March 2017), 13.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Zhao, W. 2016. Performance optimization for state machine replication based on application semantics: a review. Journal of Systems and Software, 112 (February 2012), 96--109.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Zhang, H., Chai, H., Zhao, W., Melliar-Smith, P. M., & Moser, L. E. 2012. Trustworthy coordination of Web services atomic transactions. IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 23, 8, (2012), 1551--1565.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chai, H., Zhang, H., Zhao, W., Melliar-Smith, P. M., & Moser, L. E. 2013. Toward trustworthy coordination of Web services business activities. IEEE Transactions on Services Computing, 6, 2, (2013), 276--288.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Wang, W., Hoang, D. T., Xiong, Z., Niyato, D., Wang, P., Hu, P., & Wen, Y. (2019). A survey on consensus mechanisms and mining management in blockchain networks. IEEE Access, 7, (2019), 22328--22370.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Kiayias, A., & Panagiotakos, G. 2015. Speed-Security Tradeoffs in Blockchain Protocols. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, (2015), 1019.Google Scholar
- Akbari, E., Wu, Q., Zhao, W., Arabnia, H. R., & Yang, M. Q. 2017. From Blockchain to Internet-Based Voting. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Computational Science and Computational Intelligence (Las Vegas, NV, USA, December 14-16, 2017). IEEE, 218--221.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Sapirshtein, A., Sompolinsky, Y., & Zohar, A. 2016. Optimal selfish mining strategies in bitcoin. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security (February 2016). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. 515--532.Google Scholar
- Nayak, K., Kumar, S., Miller, A., & Shi, E. 2016. Stubborn mining: Generalizing selfish mining and combining with an eclipse attack. In Proceedings of the IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (2016, March). IEEE. 305--320.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Garay, J., Kiayias, A., & Leonardos, N. (2015). The bitcoin backbone protocol: Analysis and applications. In Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques (April 2015). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. 281--310.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Decker, C., & Wattenhofer, R. 2013. Information propagation in the bitcoin network. In Proceedings of the IEEE P2P (September 2013). IEEE. 1--10.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Poon, J. and Dryja, T. 2016. The bitcoin lightning network: Scalable offchain instant payments, Lightning Labs, Tech. Rep., Nov. 2016Google Scholar
- Zhao, W., Yang, S., & Luo, X. 2020, Secure Hierarchical Processing and Logging of Sensing Data and IoT Events with Blockchain. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Blockchain Technologies (Hilo, Hawaii, HL, March 2020). ACM.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Antonopoulos, A. M. 2014. Mastering Bitcoin: unlocking digital cryptocurrencies. O'Reilly Media, Inc.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Gervais, A., Karame, G. O., Wüst, K., Glykantzis, V., Ritzdorf, H., & Capkun, S. 2016. On the security and performance of proof of work blockchains. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security (October 2016). ACM. 3--16.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Eyal, I., & Sirer, E. G. (2018). Majority is not enough: Bitcoin mining is vulnerable. Communications of the ACM, 61(7), 95--102.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Akbari, E. 2018. From Blockchain to Internet-Based Voting (Masters dissertation, Cleveland State University).Google Scholar
- Chen, M., Li, Y., Luo, X., Wang, W., Wang, L., & Zhao, W. (2019). A novel human activity recognition scheme for smart health using multilayer extreme learning machine. IEEE Internet of Things Journal, 6(2), 1410--1418.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Luo, X., Sun, J., Wang, L., Wang, W., Zhao, W., Wu, J., Wang, J. H., & Zhang, Z. (2018). Short-term wind speed forecasting via stacked extreme learning machine with generalized correntropy. IEEE Transactions on Industrial Informatics, 14(11), 4963--4971.Google ScholarCross Ref
Index Terms
- The Impact of Block Parameters on the Throughput and Security of Blockchains
Recommendations
On PeerCoin Proof of Stake for Blockchain Consensus
ICBCT '21: 2021 The 3rd International Conference on Blockchain TechnologyProof of Stake (PoS) has been talked about extensively as an alternative way of reaching consensus in blockchain systems. However, there are few publications on how PoS can be used to create new blocks in detail. The undisputed lead proponent for PoS is ...
On Consensus in Public Blockchains
ICBCT 2019: Proceedings of the 2019 International Conference on Blockchain TechnologyIn this paper, we formulate the consensus problem and its solutions as seen in public blockchains and contrast them to those of the traditional distributed consensus. The Proof of Work (PoW) algorithm introduced in Bitcoin provides the first elegant and ...
Dos and Don’ts in Blockchain Research and Development
ICBCT'22: The 2022 4th International Conference on Blockchain TechnologyThe goal of this paper is to clarify common misconceptions regarding the blockchain technology, and pointing out some worrisome practices in the field of blockchain technology. We first provide a brief introduction of the blockchain technology, ...
Comments