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Paper 2017/367

Forking-Free Hybrid Consensus with Generalized Proof-of-Activity

Shuyang Tang, Zhiqiang Liu, Sherman S. M. Chow, Zhen Liu, and Yu Long

Abstract

Bitcoin and its underlying blockchain mechanism have been attracting much attention. One of their core innovations, Proof-of-Work (PoW), is notoriously inefficient and potentially motivates a centralization of computing power, which defeats the original aim of decentralization. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is later proposed to replace PoW. However, both PoW and PoS have different inherent advantages and disadvantages, so does Proof-of-Activity (PoA) of Bentov et al. (SIGMETRICS 2014) which only offers limited combinations of two mechanisms. On the other hand, the hybrid consensus protocol of Pass and Shi (ePrint 2016/917) aims to improve the efficiency by dynamically maintaining a rotating committee. Yet, there are unsatisfactory issues including selfish mining and fair committee election. In this paper, we firstly devise a generalized variant of PoW. After that, we leverage our newly proposed generalized PoW to construct forking-free hybrid consensus, which addresses issues faced by a regular hybrid consensus mechanism. We further combine our forking-free hybrid consensus mechanism with PoS for a generalization of PoA. Compared with PoA, our generalized PoA improves the efficiency and provides more flexible combinations of PoW and PoS, resulting in a more powerful and applicable consensus scheme.

Metadata
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PDF
Publication info
Preprint. MINOR revision.
Keywords
BlockchainConsensusCryptocurrencyHybrid consensusPractical Byzantine Fault ToleranceProof-of-StakeProof-of-Work
Contact author(s)
htftsy @ sjtu edu cn
History
2017-12-13: last of 7 revisions
2017-04-28: received
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Short URL
https://ia.cr/2017/367
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY
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