The notion of *incrementally verifiable computation*, introduced by Valiant (TCC '08), has the potential to significantly reduce such participation costs. While prior works have studied incremental verification for basic payment systems, the study of incremental verification for a general class of ledger systems remains in its infancy.
In this paper we initiate a systematic study of incremental verification for ledger systems, including its foundations, implementation, and empirical evaluation. We formulate a cryptographic primitive providing the functionality and security for this setting, and then demonstrate how it captures applications with privacy and user-defined computations. We build a system that enables incremental verification, for applications such as privacy-preserving payments, with universal (application-independent) setup. Finally, we show that incremental verification can reduce participation costs by orders of magnitude, for a bare-bones version of Bitcoin.
Category / Keywords: cryptographic protocols / incrementally verifiable computation; succinct arguments; ledger systems Date: received 4 Dec 2020 Contact author: weikengchen at berkeley edu,alexch@berkeley edu,edauterman@berkeley edu,npward@berkeley edu Available format(s): PDF | BibTeX Citation Version: 20201208:124445 (All versions of this report) Short URL: ia.cr/2020/1522