2019 | OriginalPaper | Chapter
On Trees, Chains and Fast Transactions in the Blockchain
Authors : Aggelos Kiayias, Giorgos Panagiotakos
Published in: Progress in Cryptology – LATINCRYPT 2017
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Activate our intelligent search to find suitable subject content or patents.
Select sections of text to find matching patents with Artificial Intelligence. powered by
Select sections of text to find additional relevant content using AI-assisted search. powered by
Abstract
GHOST
protocol which, notably, was proposed to be at the core of Ethereum as well as other recent proposals for improved Bitcoin-like systems. The GHOST
variant is touted as offering superior performance compared to Bitcoin (potentially offering block production speed up by a factor of more than 40) without a security loss. Motivated by this, in this work, we study from a provable security point of view the GHOST
protocol.GHOST
and Bitcoin protocols, the former of which we extract and formally describe. We then prove that GHOST
implements a “robust transaction ledger” (i.e., possesses liveness and persistence) and hence it is a provably secure alternative to Bitcoin; moreover, our bound for the liveness parameter is superior to that proven for the bitcoin backbone in line with the original expectation for GHOST
. Our proof follows a novel methodology for establishing that GHOST
is a robust transaction ledger compared to previous works, which may be of independent interest and can be applicable to other blockchain variants.