Solida: A Blockchain Protocol Based on Reconfigurable Byzantine Consensus

Authors Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, Alexander Spiegelman



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Ittai Abraham
Dahlia Malkhi
Kartik Nayak
Ling Ren
Alexander Spiegelman

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Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, and Alexander Spiegelman. Solida: A Blockchain Protocol Based on Reconfigurable Byzantine Consensus. In 21st International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 95, pp. 25:1-25:19, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2017.25

Abstract

The decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin has experienced great success but also encountered many challenges. One of the challenges has been the long confirmation time. Another chal- lenge is the lack of incentives at certain steps of the protocol, raising concerns for transaction withholding, selfish mining, etc. To address these challenges, we propose Solida, a decentralized blockchain protocol based on reconfigurable Byzantine consensus augmented by proof-of-work. Solida improves on Bitcoin in confirmation time, and provides safety and liveness assuming the adversary control less than (roughly) one-third of the total mining power.

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Keywords
  • Cryptocurrency
  • Blockchain
  • Byzantine fault tolerance
  • Reconfiguration

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