Consensus on Demand
Pages 299 - 313
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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Published In
Nov 2022
377 pages
ISBN:978-3-031-21016-7
DOI:10.1007/978-3-031-21017-4
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.
Publisher
Springer-Verlag
Berlin, Heidelberg
Publication History
Published: 15 November 2022
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