RDV: An Alternative To Proof-of-Work And A Real Decentralized Consensus For Blockchain

A blockchain is a decentralized ledger where all transactions are recorded. For having a reliable blockchain and double-spending prevention, we need a decentralized consensus and agreement on a blockchain. Bitcoin uses proof-of-work (PoW). It is a cryptographic puzzle that is difficult to solve but easy to verify. However, because of significant latency of proof-of-work for transactions confirmation, this consensus mechanism is vulnerable against double-spending. On the other hand, PoW consumes a significant amount of energy that by growing the network, it becomes a major problematic of this consensus mechanism. In this paper, we introduce an alternative to PoW, because of all its major problems and security issues that may lead to collapsing decentralization of the blockchain, while a full decentralized system is the main purpose of using blockchain technology. The approach we introduce is based on a distributed voting process and called "RDV: Register, Deposit, Vote". Since in RDV algorithm, there is no mining process, so it is appropriate for low-level energy devices and Internet of Things (IoT).

[1]  David Schwartz,et al.  The Ripple Protocol Consensus Algorithm , 2014 .

[2]  Nancy A. Lynch,et al.  Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process , 1983, PODS '83.

[3]  Siamak Solat,et al.  Security of Electronic Payment Systems : A Comprehensive Survey Siamak Solat , 2018 .

[4]  Emin Gün Sirer,et al.  Majority Is Not Enough: Bitcoin Mining Is Vulnerable , 2013, Financial Cryptography.

[5]  Ittay Eyal,et al.  The Miner's Dilemma , 2014, 2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[6]  Christian Decker,et al.  Have a snack, pay with Bitcoins , 2013, IEEE P2P 2013 Proceedings.

[7]  Daniel Davis Wood,et al.  ETHEREUM: A SECURE DECENTRALISED GENERALISED TRANSACTION LEDGER , 2014 .

[8]  Prateek Saxena,et al.  On Power Splitting Games in Distributed Computation: The Case of Bitcoin Pooled Mining , 2015, 2015 IEEE 28th Computer Security Foundations Symposium.

[9]  Leslie Lamport,et al.  The Byzantine Generals Problem , 1982, TOPL.

[10]  Nancy A. Lynch,et al.  Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony , 1988, JACM.

[11]  Björn Scheuermann,et al.  Bitcoin and Beyond: A Technical Survey on Decentralized Digital Currencies , 2016, IEEE Communications Surveys & Tutorials.

[12]  Atul Singh,et al.  Eclipse Attacks on Overlay Networks: Threats and Defenses , 2006, Proceedings IEEE INFOCOM 2006. 25TH IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications.

[13]  Peng Jiang,et al.  A Survey on the Security of Blockchain Systems , 2017, Future Gener. Comput. Syst..

[14]  Danny Dolev,et al.  On the minimal synchronism needed for distributed consensus , 1983, 24th Annual Symposium on Foundations of Computer Science (sfcs 1983).

[15]  Michael Okun.  Agreement Among Unacquainted Byzantine Generals , 2005, DISC.

[16]  Joshua A. Kroll,et al.  The Economics of Bitcoin Mining, or Bitcoin in the Presence of Adversaries , 2013 .

[17]  Iddo Bentov,et al.  Proof of Activity: Extending Bitcoin's Proof of Work via Proof of Stake [Extended Abstract]y , 2014, PERV.

[18]  Ethan Heilman,et al.  One Weird Trick to Stop Selfish Miners: Fresh Bitcoins, A Solution for the Honest Miner (Poster Abstract) , 2014, Financial Cryptography Workshops.

[19]  Lear Bahack,et al.  Theoretical Bitcoin Attacks with less than Half of the Computational Power (draft) , 2013, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[20]  Aviv Zohar,et al.  Accelerating Bitcoin's Transaction Processing. Fast Money Grows on Trees, Not Chains , 2013, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[21]  Miguel Oom Temudo de Castro,et al.  Practical Byzantine fault tolerance , 1999, OSDI '99.

[22]  Christian Decker,et al.  Information propagation in the Bitcoin network , 2013, IEEE P2P 2013 Proceedings.

[23]  James Aspnes,et al.  Randomized protocols for asynchronous consensus , 2002, Distributed Computing.

[24]  Ben Laurie,et al.  “ Proof-of-Work ” Proves Not to Work version 0 . 2 , 2004 .

[25]  David Mazières.  The Stellar Consensus Protocol : A Federated Model for Internet-level Consensus , 2015 .

[26]  Sunny King,et al.  PPCoin: Peer-to-Peer Crypto-Currency with Proof-of-Stake , 2012 .

[27]  Ghassan O. Karame,et al.  Misbehavior in Bitcoin: A Study of Double-Spending and Accountability , 2015, TSEC.

[28]  Maria Gradinariu Potop-Butucaru,et al.  ZeroBlock: Timestamp-Free Prevention of Block-Withholding Attack in Bitcoin , 2016 .

[29]  Jeremy Clark,et al.  SoK: Research Perspectives and Challenges for Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies , 2015, 2015 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy.

[30]  Jae Kwon,et al.  Tendermint : Consensus without Mining , 2014 .

[31]  Satoshi Nakamoto.  Bitcoin : A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System , 2009 .

[32]  Joseph J. LaViola,et al.  Byzantine Consensus from Moderately-Hard Puzzles : A Model for Bitcoin , 2014 .

[33]  Adam Back,et al.  Hashcash - A Denial of Service Counter-Measure , 2002 .

[34]  Aggelos Kiayias,et al.  The Bitcoin Backbone Protocol: Analysis and Applications , 2015, EUROCRYPT.

[35]  Ghassan O. Karame,et al.  Double-spending fast payments in bitcoin , 2012, CCS.

[36]  J. Aspnes,et al.  Exposing Computationally-Challenged Byzantine Impostors , 2005 .

[37]  Vivien Quéma,et al.  RBFT: Redundant Byzantine Fault Tolerance , 2013, 2013 IEEE 33rd International Conference on Distributed Computing Systems.

[38]  L. Ren.  Proof of Stake Velocity: Building the Social Currency of the Digital Age , 2014 .

[39]  Maria Gradinariu Potop-Butucaru,et al.  ZeroBlock: Preventing Selfish Mining in Bitcoin , 2016, ArXiv.

[40]  Robert Tibshirani,et al.  An Introduction to the Bootstrap , 1994 .

[41]  Leslie Lamport,et al.  The part-time parliament , 1998, TOCS.

[42]  Hubert Ritzdorf,et al.  On the Security and Performance of Proof of Work Blockchains , 2016, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..

[43]  A.W.G. de Vries.  Bitcoin's Growing Energy Problem , 2018 .

[44]  Dennis Shasha,et al.  The many faces of consensus in distributed systems , 1992, Computer.

[45]  Ilan Orlov,et al.  Proofs of Space-Time and Rational Proofs of Storage , 2019, IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch..