Kokoris Kogias, E; Jovanovic, P; Gailly, N; Khoffi, I; Gasser, L; Ford, B; (2016) Enhancing Bitcoin Security and Performance with Strong Consistency via Collective Signing. In: Proceedings of the 25th USENIX Security Symposium. (pp. pp. 279-296). USENIX Association: Austin, TX, USA.

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Abstract

While showing great promise, Bitcoin requires users to wait tens of minutes for transactions to commit, and even then, offering only probabilistic guarantees. This paper introduces ByzCoin, a novel Byzantine consensus protocol that leverages scalable collective signing to commit Bitcoin transactions irreversibly within seconds. ByzCoin achieves Byzantine consensus while preserving Bitcoin’s open membership by dynamically forming hash power-proportionate consensus groups that represent recently-successful block miners. ByzCoin employs communication trees to optimize transaction commitment and verification under normal operation while guaranteeing safety and liveness under Byzantine faults, up to a near-optimal tolerance of f faulty group members among 3 f + 2 total. ByzCoin mitigates double spending and selfish mining attacks by producing collectively signed transaction blocks within one minute of transaction submission. Tree-structured communication further reduces this latency to less than 30 seconds. Due to these optimizations, ByzCoin achieves a throughput higher than Paypal currently handles, with a confirmation latency of 15-20 seconds.

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