ABSTRACT
Consensus algorithm is the core of blockchain and it plays a crucial role in the performance of the blockchain. In general, there are two types of blockchain consensus algorithms: the Bitcoin-like Nakamoto consensus (NC) algorithms and the Byzantine fault tolerance (BFT) consensus algorithms. These two types of consensus algorithms are fundamentally different in forms and hard to be compared. However, currently, they are often used interchangeably for similar blockchains, which naturally raises a question of "given a network, which consensus would have the best performance in practice''. In this paper, we propose AlphaBlock, a theoretical framework for the performance comparison of blockchain consensus algorithms, in particular, NC algorithms and BFT algorithms. To make fair comparisons, AlphaBlock captures the most important advantages and disadvantages of both categories. Moreover, we incorporate some of the key features of the practical blockchain networks. The results show that BFT algorithms have a superior performance over NC algorithms in most cases in both throughput and latency, expect for the low latency region in large networks, where the NC algorithms show strong competence to the best BFT algorithms.
- Shehar Bano, Alberto Sonnino, Mustafa Al-Bassam, Sarah Azouvi, Patrick McCorry, Sarah Meiklejohn, and George Danezis. 2019. SoK: Consensus in the age of blockchains. In Proceedings of the 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies. 183--198. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Michael Ben-Or, Boaz Kelmer, and Tal Rabin. 1994. Asynchronous secure computations with optimal resilience. In Proceedings of the thirteenth annual ACM symposium on Principles of distributed computing. ACM, 183--192. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Iddo Bentov, Rafael Pass, and Elaine Shi. 2016. Snow White: Provably Secure Proofs of Stake. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive, Vol. 2016 (2016), 919.Google Scholar
- Gabriel Bracha. 1987. Asynchronous Byzantine agreement protocols. Information and Computation, Vol. 75, 2 (1987), 130--143. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Miguel Castro and Barbara Liskov. 1999. Practical Byzantine fault tolerance. In OSDI, Vol. 99. 173--186. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Kyle Croman, Christian Decker, Ittay Eyal, Adem Efe Gencer, Ari Juels, Ahmed Kosba, Andrew Miller, Prateek Saxena, Elaine Shi, Emin Gün Sirer, et al. 2016. On scaling decentralized blockchains. In International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security. Springer, 106--125.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Tien Tuan Anh Dinh, Ji Wang, Gang Chen, Rui Liu, Beng Chin Ooi, and Kian-Lee Tan. 2017. Blockbench: A framework for analyzing private blockchains. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM International Conference on Management of Data. 1085--1100. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Cynthia Dwork, Nancy Lynch, and Larry Stockmeyer. 1988. Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony. Journal of the ACM (JACM), Vol. 35, 2 (1988), 288--323. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Ittay Eyal, Adem Efe Gencer, Emin Gun Sirer, and Robbert Van Renesse. 2016. Bitcoin-NG: A scalable blockchain protocol. In 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 16). USENIX Association, 45--59. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Juan Garay and Aggelos Kiayias. 2020. SoK: A Consensus Taxonomy in the Blockchain Era. In Topics in Cryptology -- CT-RSA 2020, Stanislaw Jarecki (Ed.). Springer International Publishing, Cham, 284--318.Google ScholarDigital Library
- Juan Garay, Aggelos Kiayias, and Nikos Leonardos. 2015. The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol: Analysis and Applications. In Advances in Cryptology - EUROCRYPT 2015, Elisabeth Oswald and Marc Fischlin (Eds.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 281--310.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Arthur Gervais, Ghassan O Karame, Karl Wüst, Vasileios Glykantzis, Hubert Ritzdorf, and Srdjan Capkun. 2016. On the security and performance of proof of work blockchains. In Proceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC conference on computer and communications security. 3--16. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Yossi Gilad, Rotem Hemo, Silvio Micali, Georgios Vlachos, and Nickolai Zeldovich. 2017. Algorand: Scaling byzantine agreements for cryptocurrencies. In Proceedings of the 26th Symposium on Operating Systems Principles. ACM, 51--68. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Aggelos Kiayias, Alexander Russell, Bernardo David, and Roman Oliynykov. 2017. Ouroboros: A provably secure proof-of-stake blockchain protocol. In Annual International Cryptology Conference. Springer, 357--388.Google ScholarCross Ref
- Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias, Philipp Jovanovic, Linus Gasser, Nicolas Gailly, and Bryan Ford. [n.d.]. OmniLedger: A Secure, Scale-Out, Decentralized Ledger. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive ([n.,d.]). https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/406.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Jae Kwon. 2014. Tendermint: Consensus without mining. (2014). https://tendermint.com/static/docs/tendermint.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease. 1982. The Byzantine generals problem. ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems (TOPLAS), Vol. 4, 3 (1982), 382--401. Google ScholarDigital Library
- Chenxing Li, Peilun Li, Wei Xu, Fan Long, and Andrew Chi-chih Yao. 2018. Scaling Nakamoto Consensus to Thousands of Transactions per Second. arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.03870 (2018).Google Scholar
- Satoshi Nakamoto. 2008. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. (2008). https://bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdfGoogle Scholar
- Yonatan Sompolinsky, Yoad Lewenberg, and Aviv Zohar. 2016. SPECTRE: A Fast and Scalable Cryptocurrency Protocol. IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch., Vol. 2016 (2016), 1159.Google Scholar
- Marko Vukolić. 2015. The quest for scalable blockchain fabric: Proof-of-work vs. BFT replication. In International Workshop on Open Problems in Network Security. Springer, 112--125.Google Scholar
- Maofan Yin, Dahlia Malkhi, Michael K Reiter, Guy Golan Gueta, and Ittai Abraham. 2018. Hotstuff: Bft consensus in the lens of blockchain. arXiv preprint arXiv:1803.05069 (2018).Google Scholar
- Maofan Yin, Dahlia Malkhi, Michael K. Reiter, Guy Golan Gueta, and Ittai Abraham. 2019. HotStuff: BFT Consensus with Linearity and Responsiveness. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (Toronto ON, Canada) (PODC '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 347--356. https://doi.org/10.1145/3293611.3331591 Google ScholarDigital Library
Index Terms
- AlphaBlock: An Evaluation Framework for Blockchain Consensus Algorithms
Recommendations
Adapted PBFT Consensus Protocol for Sharded Blockchain
Science of Cyber SecurityAbstractAs the foundation of a blockchain, consensus algorithm significantly affects the blockchain system’s performance. To a consortium blockchain, Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance (PBFT) has been widely believed as a good candidate consensus due to ...
Key Characteristics to Create Optimized Blockchain Consensus Algorithms
Responsible AI and Analytics for an Ethical and Inclusive Digitized SocietyAbstractBlockchain is a fairly new technology and still in its infancy. As a result, many research papers are creating optimized consensus algorithms. Therefore, a need for key characteristics to create optimized blockchain consensus algorithms has been ...
VSSB-Raft: A Secure and Efficient Zero Trust Consensus Algorithm for Blockchain
To solve the problems of vote forgery and malicious election of candidate nodes in the Raft consensus algorithm, we combine zero trust with the Raft consensus algorithm and propose a secure and efficient consensus algorithm -Verifiable Secret Sharing ...
Comments