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Permissionless Consensus
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Blockchain protocols typically aspire to run in the permissionless setting, in which nodes are owned and operated by a large number of diverse and unknown entities, with each node free to start or stop running the protocol at any time. This setting is more challenging than the traditional permissioned setting, in which the set of nodes that will be running the protocol is fixed and known at the time of protocol deployment. The goal of this paper is to provide a framework for reasoning about the rich design space of blockchain protocols and their capabilities and limitations in the permissionless setting. We propose a hierarchy of settings with different "degrees of permissionlessness", specified by the amount of knowledge that a protocol has about the current participants: These are the fully permissionless, dynamically available and quasi-permissionless settings. The paper also proves several results illustrating the utility of our analysis framework for reasoning about blockchain protocols in these settings. For example: (1) In the fully permissionless setting, even with synchronous communication and with severe restrictions on the total size of the Byzantine players, every deterministic protocol for Byzantine agreement has a non-terminating execution. (2) In the dynamically available and partially synchronous setting, no protocol can solve the Byzantine agreement problem with high probability, even if there are no Byzantine players at all. (3) In the quasi-permissionless and partially synchronous setting, by contrast, assuming a bound on the total size of the Byzantine players, there is a deterministic protocol solving state machine replication. (4) In the quasi-permissionless and synchronous setting, every proof-of-stake state machine replication protocol that uses only time-malleable cryptographic primitives is vulnerable to long-range attacks.
Forward citations
Cited by 6 Pith papers
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Fast Deterministically Safe Proof-of-Work Consensus
Sieve-MMR is a proof-of-work consensus protocol that achieves deterministic safety and constant expected latency in a fully permissionless model by layering MMR on a new time-travel-resilient broadcast primitive called Sieve.
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Nakamoto Consensus from Multiple Resources
In an idealized model, a longest-chain blockchain that weighs blocks by Gamma(S,V,W) is secure against private double-spending attacks if and only if Gamma is monotone and homogeneous of degree one in the timed resour...
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From Permissioned to Proof-of-Stake Consensus
A generic compiler transforms any permissioned consensus protocol into a proof-of-stake permissionless protocol with the same fault tolerance, plus accountability.
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Multimmit: Extending Blocks for Faster Finality
Multimmit finalises transaction blocks in one voting round with roughly 3δ average latency from dissemination, confining a faulty producer's damage to its own chain.
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On the (in)security of Proofs-of-Space based Longest-Chain Blockchains
No chain selection rule can secure a proof-of-space longest-chain blockchain when honest space varies over time: the attacker wins with a fork of length about phi squared times rho divided by epsilon, and this is tigh...
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Symmetry all the way down
Asymmetric Byzantine quorum systems add no extra solvability for depth-two-or-higher tasks; a depth-2 compiler produces an equivalent symmetric system, and no depth-1 compiler exists.
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