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piChain: When a Blockchain meets Paxos

Authors Conrad Burchert, Roger Wattenhofer

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Keywords
  • Consensus
  • Crash Failures
  • Availability
  • Network Partition
  • Consistency

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Abstract

We present a new fault-tolerant distributed state machine to inherit the best features of its “parents in spirit”: Paxos, providing strong consistency, and a blockchain, providing simplicity and availability. Our proposal is simple as it does not include any heavy weight distributed failure handling protocols such as leader election. In addition, our proposal has a few other valuable features, e.g., it is responsive, it scales well, and it does not send any overhead messages.

Cite As Get BibTex

Conrad Burchert and Roger Wattenhofer. piChain: When a Blockchain meets Paxos. In 21st International Conference on Principles of Distributed Systems (OPODIS 2017). Leibniz International Proceedings in Informatics (LIPIcs), Volume 95, pp. 2:1-2:13, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2018) https://doi.org/10.4230/LIPIcs.OPODIS.2017.2

Author Details

Conrad Burchert
Roger Wattenhofer

References

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