Fundamental approaches to scale blockchain
Abstract/Contents
- Abstract
- In 2008, Satoshi Nakamoto invented Bitcoin, the first cryptocurrency. It gave birth to the field of blockchain which provides decentralized trust platforms by leveraging cryptography, distributed systems, and networks. Blockchain is touted as one of the biggest innovations in money and finance since the advent of central banking. In the last decade, this field has grown exponentially, facilitating global transactions worth trillions of dollars. This phenomenon has jump-started the application of and spurred new research in consensus protocols, payments networks, and programmable money, among many others. However, this ingenious technology, Bitcoin, can support a throughput of only 5-8 transactions per second (tps), with confirmation latency in hours due to its protocol limitations. On top of its sluggish performance, it consumes the energy equivalent of a mid-sized country like Austria. In order to take this technology mainstream we need to design and develop new protocols that are scalable, energy-efficient, secure, and lightning-fast, all at the same time. This thesis is an attempt towards achieving this goal by taking a first principle approach to design new scalable protocols. We first design Prism, a proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocol that can simultaneously support high throughput and low confirmation latency. It achieves throughput equal to the network capacity which is optimal and obtains a confirmation latency in the order of the network delay which is near-optimal. We then implement a full-stack system for Prism in Rust that achieves a throughput of 70,000 tps with confirmation latency < 40 seconds. PoW protocols use energy to maintain their security and hence end up consuming tons of energy! Proof-of-stake (PoS) protocols are purported to solve this issue by using the internal currency instead of energy to maintain security. We design a PoS protocol to mimic the functionality and security of bitcoin's PoW protocol. Compared to the existing PoS protocols, we achieve better security against bribing and prediction attacks. The rigorously prove the security properties of this protocol and Prism, and we believe these techniques can be used to prove the security of other protocols. We continue on the path of making blockchains scalable by designing Boomerang, a protocol on top of the Lightning Network which mitigates their straggler problem by adding redundancy in payments which results in 2x improvement in both throughput and latency
Description
| Type of resource | text |
|---|---|
| Form | electronic resource; remote; computer; online resource |
| Extent | 1 online resource |
| Place | California |
| Place | [Stanford, California] |
| Publisher | [Stanford University] |
| Copyright date | 2020; ©2020 |
| Publication date | 2020; 2020 |
| Issuance | monographic |
| Language | English |
Creators/Contributors
| Author | Bagaria, Vivek Kumar |
|---|---|
| Degree supervisor | Tse, David |
| Thesis advisor | Tse, David |
| Thesis advisor | Boneh, Dan, 1969- |
| Thesis advisor | Goel, Ashish |
| Degree committee member | Boneh, Dan, 1969- |
| Degree committee member | Goel, Ashish |
| Associated with | Stanford University, Department of Electrical Engineering. |
Subjects
| Genre | Theses |
|---|---|
| Genre | Text |
Bibliographic information
| Statement of responsibility | Vivek Bagaria |
|---|---|
| Note | Submitted to the Department of Electrical Engineering |
| Thesis | Thesis Ph.D. Stanford University 2020 |
| Location | electronic resource |
Access conditions
- Copyright
- © 2020 by Vivek Kumar Bagaria
- License
- This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution Non Commercial 3.0 Unported license (CC BY-NC).
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