Computer Science

Bitcoin's consistency property

Document Type

Conference Paper

Abstract

Bitcoin is the most popular cryptocurrency nowadays. Inspired by the success, both industry and academia seek to apply Bitcoin's core technique, Blockchain, to other fields like finance, healthcare and Internet-of-Things. One main application is to use Blockchain as the distributed transaction ledger system, a ledger (or a log) of all transactions that is maintained by anonymous participants in a distributed fashion. For the ledger system, consistency is an important property which specifies how the system orders the transactions. Intuitively, Blockchain is designed to maintain a single ground truth - the chain itself is the order of the transactions that all participants should respect. However, we show that under some circumstances, Bitcoin violates eventual consistency, i.e., participants would not converge to a single chain. Thus, we urge a more thorough study on Bitcoin's consistency properties. At the end of the paper, we propose related research directions.

Publication Title

Proceedings of IEEE Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing, PRDC

Publication Date

2017

First Page

219

Last Page

220

ISSN

1541-0110

ISBN

9781509056514

DOI

10.1109/PRDC.2017.39

Keywords

Bitcoin, Blockchain, distributed system, eventual consistency, strong consistency

APA Citation

Tseng, L. (2017, January). Bitcoin’s consistency property. In 2017 IEEE 22nd Pacific Rim International Symposium on Dependable Computing (PRDC) (pp. 219-220). IEEE.

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