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A Formal Analysis of the Bitcoin Protocol

Authors Cosimo Laneve , Adele Veschetti

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Author Details

Cosimo Laneve
  • Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna - INRIA Focus, Italy
Adele Veschetti
  • Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Bologna - INRIA Focus, Italy

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Cosimo Laneve and Adele Veschetti. A Formal Analysis of the Bitcoin Protocol. In Recent Developments in the Design and Implementation of Programming Languages. Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 86, pp. 2:1-2:17, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2020) https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.Gabbrielli.2

Abstract

We study Nakamoto’s Bitcoin protocol that implements a distributed ledger on peer-to-peer asynchronous networks. In particular, we define a principled formal model of key participants - the miners - as stochastic processes and describe the whole system as a parallel composition of miners. We therefore compute the probability that ledgers turn into a state with more severe inconsistencies, e.g. with longer forks, under the assumptions that messages are not lost and nodes are not hostile. We also study how the presence of hostile nodes mining blocks in wrong positions impacts on the consistency of the ledgers. Our theoretical results agree with the simulations performed on a probabilistic model checker that we extended with dynamic datatypes in order to have a faithful description of miners' behaviour.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Theory of computation → Formalisms
Keywords
  • Bitcoin
  • Distributed consensus
  • Distributed ledgers
  • Blockchain
  • PRISM
  • forks

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