2019/07/31 by Patrik Keller, Keller, Patrik, Rainer Böhme +1
Computer Science · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #Distributed #Distributed systems and fault tolerance #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Parallel #Software-Defined Networks and 5G #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1907.13531
openalex publication_date 2019/07/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
A fundamental conflict of many proof-of-work systems is that they want to achieve inclusiveness and security at the same time. We analyze and resolve this conflict with a theory of proof-of-work quorums, which enables a new bridge between Byzantine and Nakamoto consensus. The theory yields stochastic uniqueness of quorums as a function of a security parameter. We employ the theory in HotPoW, a scalable permissionless distributed log protocol that supports finality based on the pipelined three-phase commit previously presented for HotStuff. We evaluate HotPoW and variants with adversarial modifications by simulation. Results show that the protocol can tolerate network latency, churn, and targeted attacks on consistency and liveness with a small storage overhead compared to plain Nakamoto consensus and less complexity than protocols that rely on sidechains for finality.