Paper 2018/104
PHANTOM and GHOSTDAG: A Scalable Generalization of Nakamoto Consensus
Yonatan Sompolinsky, Shai Wyborski, and Aviv Zohar
Abstract
In 2008 Satoshi Nakamoto invented the basis for blockchain-based distributed ledgers. The core concept of this system is an open and anonymous network of nodes, or miners, which together maintain a public ledger of transactions. The ledger takes the form of a chain of blocks, the blockchain, where each block is a batch of new transactions collected from users.
One primary problem with Satoshi's blockchain is its highly limited scalability. The security of Satoshi's longest chain rule, more generally known as the Bitcoin protocol, requires that all honest nodes be aware of each other's blocks very soon after the block's creation. To this end, the throughput of the system is artificially suppressed so that each block fully propagates before the next one is created, and that very few ``orphan blocks'' that fork the chain be created spontaneously.
In this paper we present PHANTOM, a proof-of-work based protocol for a permissionless ledger that generalizes Nakamoto's blockchain to a direct acyclic graph of blocks (blockDAG). PHANTOM includes a parameter
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Applications
- Publication info
- Preprint. MINOR revision.
- Keywords
- BlockDAGCryptocurrencyConsensus Protocols
- Contact author(s)
-
yonatan sompolinsky @ mail huji ac il
shaiw @ daglabs com - History
- 2021-11-10: last of 17 revisions
- 2018-01-30: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2018/104
- License
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CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/104, author = {Yonatan Sompolinsky and Shai Wyborski and Aviv Zohar}, title = {{PHANTOM} and {GHOSTDAG}: A Scalable Generalization of Nakamoto Consensus}, howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2018/104}, year = {2018}, url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/104} }