Publication Details
StrongChain: Transparent and Collaborative Proof-of-Work Consensus
Bitcoin, proof-of-work, selfish mining, timestamp accuracy
Bitcoin is the most successful cryptocurrency so far. This is mainly due to its
novel consensus algorithm, which is based on proof-of-work combined with
a cryptographically-protected data structure and a rewarding scheme that
incentivizes nodes to participate. However, despite its unprecedented success
Bitcoin suffers from many inefficiencies. For instance, Bitcoin's consensus
mechanism has been proved to be incentive-incompatible, its high reward variance
causes centralization, and its hardcoded deflation raises questions about its
long-term sustainability. In this work, we revise the Bitcoin consensus mechanism
by proposing StrongChain, a scheme that introduces transparency and incentivizes
participants to collaborate rather than to compete. The core design of our
protocol is to reflect and utilize the computing power aggregated on the
blockchain which is invisible and "wasted" in Bitcoin today. Introducing
relatively easy, although important changes to Bitcoin's design enables us to
improve many crucial aspects of Bitcoin-like cryptocurrencies making it more
secure, efficient, and profitable for participants. We thoroughly analyze our
approach and we present an implementation of StrongChain. The obtained results
confirm its efficiency, security, and deployability.
@inproceedings{BUT162600,
author="Ivan {Homoliak}",
title="StrongChain: Transparent and Collaborative Proof-of-Work Consensus",
booktitle="Proceedings of The 28th USENIX Security Symposium",
year="2019",
pages="819--836",
address="Santa Clara",
isbn="978-1-939133-06-9",
url="https://www.usenix.org/system/files/sec19-szalachowski.pdf"
}