Paper 2022/1571
Practical Settlement Bounds for Longest-Chain Consensus
Abstract
Nakamoto's longest-chain consensus paradigm now powers the bulk of the world's cryptocurrencies and distributed finance infrastructure. An emblematic property of longest-chain consensus is that it provides probabilistic settlement guarantees that strengthen over time. This makes the exact relationship between settlement error and settlement latency a critical aspect of the protocol that both users and system designers must understand to make informed decisions. A recent line of work has finally provided a satisfactory rigorous accounting of this relationship for proof-of-work longest-chain protocols, but those techniques do not appear to carry over to the proof-of-stake setting. This article develops a new analytic approach for establishing such settlement guarantees that yields explicit, rigorous settlement bounds for proof-of-stake longest-chain protocols, placing them on equal footing with their proof-of-work counterparts. Our techniques apply with some adaptations to the proof-of-work setting where they provide improvements to the state-of-the-art settlement bounds for proof-of-work protocols.
Metadata
- Available format(s)
-
PDF
- Category
- Cryptographic protocols
- Publication info
- A minor revision of an IACR publication in CRYPTO 2023
- Keywords
- Bitcoinlongest chain consensusproof of workproof of stake
- Contact author(s)
-
peter gazi @ iohk io
renling @ illinois edu
alexander russell @ uconn edu - History
- 2025-05-02: revised
- 2022-11-11: received
- See all versions
- Short URL
- https://ia.cr/2022/1571
- License
-
CC BY
BibTeX
@misc{cryptoeprint:2022/1571,
author = {Peter Gaži and Ling Ren and Alexander Russell},
title = {Practical Settlement Bounds for Longest-Chain Consensus},
howpublished = {Cryptology {ePrint} Archive, Paper 2022/1571},
year = {2022},
url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2022/1571}
}
