research-article

On the Necessity of a Prescribed Block Validity Consensus: Analyzing Bitcoin Unlimited Mining Protocol

Authors:

Bart PreneelAuthors Info & Claims

CoNEXT '17: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

Pages 108 - 119

https://doi.org/10.1145/3143361.3143389

Published: 28 November 2017 Publication History

Abstract

Bitcoin has not only attracted many users but also been considered as a technical breakthrough by academia. However, the expanding potential of Bitcoin is largely untapped due to its limited throughput. The Bitcoin community is now facing its biggest crisis in history as the community splits on how to increase the throughput. Among various proposals, Bitcoin Unlimited recently became the most popular candidate, as it allows miners to collectively decide the block size limit according to the real network capacity. However, the security of BU is heatedly debated and no consensus has been reached as the issue is discussed in different miner incentive models. In this paper, we systematically evaluate BU's security with three incentive models via testing the two major arguments of BU supporters: the block validity consensus is not necessary for BU's security; such consensus would emerge in BU out of economic incentives. Our results invalidate both arguments and therefore disprove BU's security claims. Our paper further contributes to the field by addressing the necessity of a prescribed block validity consensus for cryptocurrencies.

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On the Necessity of a Prescribed Block Validity Consensus: Analyzing Bitcoin Unlimited Mining Protocol

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cover image ACM Conferences

CoNEXT '17: Proceedings of the 13th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

November 2017

492 pages

ISBN:9781450354226

DOI:10.1145/3143361

Copyright © 2017 ACM.

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Published: 28 November 2017

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CoNEXT '17: The 13th International Conference on emerging Networking EXperiments and Technologies

December 12 - 15, 2017

Incheon, Republic of Korea

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Chen JCheng YXu ZCao Y(2023)Decision on block size in blockchain systems by evolutionary equilibrium analysisTheoretical Computer Science10.1016/j.tcs.2022.11.026942:C(93-106)Online publication date: 9-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1016/j.tcs.2022.11.026
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https://doi.org/10.3390/su14127036
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