Security of Blockchains at Capacity

ePrint Report: Security of Blockchains at Capacity

Lucianna Kiffer, Joachim Neu, Srivatsan Sridhar, Aviv Zohar, David Tse

Given a network of nodes with certain communication and computation capacities, what is the maximum rate at which a blockchain can run securely? We study this question for proof-of-work (PoW) and proof-of-stake (PoS) longest chain protocols under a ‘bounded bandwidth’ model which captures queuing and processing delays due to high block rate relative to capacity, bursty release of adversarial blocks, and in PoS, …

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