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  4. Enhancing Bitcoin Security and Performance with Strong Consistency via Collective Signing
 
conference paper

Enhancing Bitcoin Security and Performance with Strong Consistency via Collective Signing

Kokoris-Kogias, Lefteris
•
Jovanovic, Philipp Svetolik  
•
Gailly, Nicolas  
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2016
Proceedings Of The 25Th Usenix Security Symposium
25th USENIX Security Symposium

While showing great promise, Bitcoin requires users to wait tens of minutes for transactions to commit, and 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 that represent 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. Due to these optimizations, ByzCoin achieves a throughput higher than PayPal currently handles, with a confirmation latency of 15-20 seconds.

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Type
conference paper
Web of Science ID

WOS:000385263000017

Author(s)
Kokoris-Kogias, Lefteris
Jovanovic, Philipp Svetolik  
Gailly, Nicolas  
Khoffi, Ismail
Gasser, Linus
Ford, Bryan Alexander  
Date Issued

2016

Publisher

USENIX Association

Publisher place

Berkeley, CA, USA

Published in
Proceedings Of The 25Th Usenix Security Symposium
ISBN of the book

978-1-931971-32-4

Total of pages

18

Start page

279

End page

296

Subjects

Bitcoin

•

blockchain

•

cryptocurrency

•

Byzantine consensus

•

scalability

Editorial or Peer reviewed

REVIEWED

Written at

EPFL

EPFL units
DEDIS  
DEDIS  
Event nameEvent placeEvent date
25th USENIX Security Symposium

Austin, TX

AUG 10-12, 2016

Available on Infoscience
July 28, 2016
Use this identifier to reference this record
https://infoscience.epfl.ch/handle/20.500.14299/128177
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