Enhancing Bitcoin Security and Performance with Strong Consistency via Collective Signing

Eleftherios Kokoris-Kogias
Philipp Jovanovic
Nicolas Gailly
Ismail Khoffi
Linus Gasser
Bryan Ford
While showing great promise, Bitcoin requires users to wait tens of minutes for transactions to commit - even then offering only probabilistic guarantees. This paper introduces ByzCoin, a novel Byzantine consensus protocol that leverages scalable collective signing to commit Bitcoin transactions irreversibly within seconds. ByzCoin achieves Byzantine consensus while preserving Bitcoin's open membership by dynamically forming hash power-proportionate consensus groups representing recently-successful block miners. ByzCoin employs communication trees to optimize transaction commitment and verification under normal operation while guaranteeing safety and liveness under Byzantine faults, up to a near-optimal tolerance of f faulty group members among 3f+2 total. ByzCoin mitigates double spending and selfish mining attacks by producing collectively signed transaction blocks within one minute of transaction submission. Tree-structured communication further reduces this latency to less than 30 seconds. Thanks to these optimizations ByzCoin achieves a throughput higher than Paypal currently handles, with confirmation latencies of 15-20 seconds.

Metadata

Year 2016
Peer Reviewed not_interested
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