Decor+ Hop: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol

Sergio Demian Lerner
Cryptocurrencies, based on and led by Bitcoin, have shown promise as infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments, cheap remittance, trustless digital asset exchange, and smart contracts. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchain protocols have inherent scalability limits that trade-off between throughput and latency and withhold the realization of this potential. This paper presents DECOR+HOP , a new blockchain protocol designed to scale. Based on Bitcoin’s blockchain protocol, DECOR+HOP is Byzantine fault tolerant, is robust to extreme churn, and shares the same trust model obviating qualitative changes to the ecosystem. In addition to DECOR+HOP , we introduce several novel metrics of interest in quantifying the security and efficiency of Bitcoin-like blockchain protocols. We implement DECOR+HOP and perform large-scale simulation at 15% the size of the operational Bitcoin system, using emulated clients of both protocols. These experiments demonstrate that DECOR+ scales near optimally, with bandwidth limited only by the capacity of the individual nodes and latency limited only by the propagation time of the network.

Metadata

Year 2016
Peer Reviewed not_interested
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