论文标题
关于区块链的最终性
On Finality in Blockchains
论文作者
论文摘要
从确定性到概率终止,存在许多形式的区块链最终条件。为了在面对分区的情况下提供可用性,而不是一致性,大多数区块链仅提供概率最终的终结性:将区块插入区块链后可能会被撤销,但随着它们越深入链条,它们的概率有所下降。其他区块链通过利用共识的直接终止性来偏爱一致性 - 附加的块永远不会被撤销 - 在额外同步的成本中。在本文中,我们专注于具有确定性最终终结性的必要条件,以实现区块链,这确保在不同过程中选择的主要链具有共同的前缀。这是一种弱的终结形式,使我们能够在无限数量的拜占庭式故障的情况下提供异步系统中的解决方案。我们还研究了最终的最终终结形式,并表明不幸的是不可能提供有限的位移。通过有界的位移,我们的意思是(未知)可以从当前区块链撤消的块数。根据界限是否已知,此问题将其减少为共识或最终共识。我们还表明,在最长链中附加块的经典选择机制(例如在比特币中)不符合最终终结性的解决方案。
There exist many forms of Blockchain finality conditions, from deterministic to probabilistic terminations. To favor availability against consistency in the face of partitions, most blockchains only offer probabilistic eventual finality: blocks may be revoked after being appended to the blockchain, yet with decreasing probability as they sink deeper into the chain. Other blockchains favor consistency by leveraging the immediate finality of Consensus-a block appended is never revoked-at the cost of additional synchronization. In this paper, we focus on necessary and sufficient conditions to implement a blockchain with deterministic eventual finality, which ensures that selected main chains at different processes share a common increasing prefix. This is a much weaker form of finality that allows us to provide a solution in an asynchronous system subject to unlimited number of byzantine failures. We study stronger forms of eventual finality as well and show that it is unfortunately impossible to provide a bounded displacement. By bounded displacement we mean that the (unknown) number of blocks that can be revoked from the current blockchain is bounded. This problem reduces to consensus or eventual consensus depending on whether the bound is known or not. We also show that the classical selection mechanism, such as in Bitcoin, that appends blocks at the longest chain is not compliant with a solution to eventual finality.