What’s So Different about Blockchain? — Blockchain is a Probabilistic State Machine
- 24 November 2016
- conference paper
- conference paper
- Published by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)
- p. 168-175
- https://doi.org/10.1109/icdcsw.2016.28
Abstract
Blockchain is a distributed timestamp server technology introduced for realization of Bitcoin, a digital cash system. It has been attracting much attention especially in the areas of financial and legal applications. But such applications would fail if they are designed without knowledge of the fundamental differences in blockchain from existing technology. We show that blockchain is a probabilistic state machine in which participants can never commit on decisions, we also show that this probabilistic nature is necessarily deduced from the condition where the number of participants remains unknown. This work provides useful abstractions to think about blockchain, and raises discussion for promoting the better use of the technology.Keywords
This publication has 13 references indexed in Scilit:
- Can We Stabilize the Price of a Cryptocurrency?: Understanding the Design of Bitcoin and Its Potential to Compete with Central Bank MoneySSRN Electronic Journal, 2014
- Information propagation in the Bitcoin networkPublished by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) ,2013
- Byzantizing Paxos by RefinementLecture Notes in Computer Science, 2011
- Eventually consistentCommunications of the ACM, 2009
- Fast Byzantine ConsensusIEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2006
- Consensus on transaction commitACM Transactions on Database Systems, 2006
- Consensus with Unknown Participants or Fundamental Self-OrganizationPublished by Springer Science and Business Media LLC ,2004
- Practical byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recoveryACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 2002
- The part-time parliamentACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 1998
- Implementing fault-tolerant services using the state machine approach: a tutorialACM Computing Surveys, 1990