Bitcoin-NG: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol

By Ittay Eyal, Adem Efe Gencer, Emin Gün Sirer, Robbert van Renesse. Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation, 2015

1,322 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/d28dd2fe450d50a414e83461bfa3449750a573d0

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Citations in the corpus

Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey (2018, neutral): “In [32], Bitcoin-NG (Next Generation) was proposed.”
Narwhal and Tusk: a DAG-based mempool and efficient BFT consensus (2021, background): “Bitcoin-NG [19] splits the consensus protocol from block proposal, achieving a 20x throughput increase, with a latency of 10 minutes (same as Bitcoin).”
Blockchain's adoption in IoT: The challenges, and a way forward (2019, methodology): “Bitcoin Blockchain Limitations Advancement in Blockchain Platforms/Applications/Technologies Energy and computation intensive PoW consensus PoS [71], PoET [82], PoB [83], PoA [79, 80], BFTbased consensus protocols [70, 85, 86, 91, 92] Lack of consensus finality and forks BFT-based consensus protocol”
Solutions to Scalability of Blockchain: A Survey (2020, methodology): “For example, Bitcoin-NG [15] is a blockchain protocol based on Nakamoto consensus [1].”
Hybrid Consensus: Efficient Consensus in the Permissionless Model (2016, methodology): “Similar to earlier works [27, 30, 36, 47], we define the following properties for a snailchain protocol.”
REM: Resource-Efficient Mining for Blockchains (2017, background): “These works, and the line of hybrid blockchain systems starting with Bitcoin-NG [36, 57, 68], can all utilize PoUW as a low-waste alternative to PoW.”
Blockchains and Smart Contracts for the Internet of Things (2016, background): “‘‘Bitcoin-NG: A scalable blockchain protocol.’’”
The Quest for Scalable Blockchain Fabric: Proof-of-Work vs. BFT Replication (2015, neutral): “, [23]) and is one of the two critical “magic numbers” in Bitcoin, the other being the block size, which is set in Bitcoin to 1 MB.”
Integrated Blockchain and Edge Computing Systems: A Survey, Some Research Issues and Challenges (2019, background): “…which are most commonly used in the existing work, are still controversial for the lost transactions in the extreme case of nodes crashing over a channel [93], although strategies like the veriﬁcation game in Truebit and PoC in iEx.ec are currently under development to address these problems.”
Untangling Blockchain: A Data Processing View of Blockchain Systems (2017, background): “BitcoinNG [67], Byzcoin [61] separate leader election from transaction validation in PoW, thus increase the overall performance.”
A Survey about Consensus Algorithms Used in Blockchain (2018, methodology): “Bitcoin-NG [38] When a node creates a key block, he could continuously make some micro blocks with transactions, until another node creates a new key block.”
Boundary conditions for traceability in food supply chains using blockchain technology (2020, methodology): “Due to a logical error in the “smart contract” code, $50 m virtual currency was stolen by a program developer (Finley, 2016).”
On Scaling Decentralized Blockchains - (A Position Paper) (2016, background): “By improving the former two, one introduces an increased number of forks, leading to a loss of the mining power that secures the system and to reduced fairness [25].”
The Blockchain as a Software Connector (2016, background): “Bitcoin-NG [8] decouples Bitcoin’s blockchain operation into two planes: leader election and transaction serialization.”
SPECTRE: A Fast and Scalable Cryptocurrency Protocol (2016, background): “Bitcoin-NG [6] provides a clever chain structure that is composed of two type of blocks key blocks that require PoW but contain no transactions and mini-blocks that do not require proof of work but do contain transactions.”
Architecture for Blockchain Applications (2019, methodology): “Some protocols have been proposed to improve scalability, for example, Bitcoin-NG (Eyal et al. 2016) and the Bitcoin Lightning network (Poon and Dryja 2016).”
A Review on the Use of Blockchain for the Internet of Things (2018, methodology): “• Bitcoin-NG [142] implements a variant of the Bitcoin”