2015/10/07 by Ittay Eyal, Adem Efe Gencer, Eyal, Ittay +5 · 8 citations
Computer Science · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Caching and Content Delivery #Cryptography and Data Security #Cryptography and Security (cs.CR) #FOS: Computer and information sciences
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1510.02037
openalex publication_date 2015/10/07 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Cryptocurrencies, based on and led by Bitcoin, have shown promise as infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments, cheap remittance, trustless digital asset exchange, and smart contracts. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchain protocols have inherent scalability limits that trade-off between throughput and latency and withhold the realization of this potential. This paper presents Bitcoin-NG, a new blockchain protocol designed to scale. Based on Bitcoin's blockchain protocol, Bitcoin-NG is Byzantine fault tolerant, is robust to extreme churn, and shares the same trust model obviating qualitative changes to the ecosystem. In addition to Bitcoin-NG, we introduce several novel metrics of interest in quantifying the security and efficiency of Bitcoin-like blockchain protocols. We implement Bitcoin-NG and perform large-scale experiments at 15% the size of the operational Bitcoin system, using unchanged clients of both protocols. These experiments demonstrate that Bitcoin-NG scales optimally, with bandwidth limited only by the capacity of the individual nodes and latency limited only by the propagation time of the network.