Bootstrapping the Blockchain, with Applications to Consensus and Fast PKI Setup

The Bitcoin backbone protocol (Eurocrypt 2015) extracts basic properties of Bitcoin’s underlying blockchain data structure, such as “common prefix” and “chain quality,” and shows how fundamental applications including consensus and a robust public transaction ledger can be built on top of them. The underlying assumptions are “proofs of work” (POWs), adversarial hashing power strictly less than 1/2 and no adversarial pre-computation—or, alternatively, the existence of an unpredictable “genesis” block.

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