Consensus from Signatures of Work

Assuming the existence of a public-key infrastructure (PKI), digital signatures are a fundamental building block in the design of secure consensus protocols with optimal resilience. More recently, with the advent of blockchain protocols like Bitcoin, consensus has been considered in the “permissionless” setting where no authentication or even point-to-point communication is available. Yet, despite some positive preliminary results, all attempts to formalize a building block that is sufficient for designing consensus protocols in this setting, rely on a very strong independence assumption about adversarial accesses to the underlying computational resource.

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