The Quest for Scalable Blockchain Fabric: Proof-of-Work vs. BFT Replication

By Marko Vukolic. Open Research Problems in Network Security, 2015

1,134 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Bitcoin cryptocurrency demonstrated the utility of global consensus across thousands of nodes, changing the world of digital transactions forever. In the early days of Bitcoin, the performance of its probabilistic proof-of-work (PoW) based consensus fabric, also known as blockchain, was not a major issue. Bitcoin became a success story, despite its consensus latencies on the order of an hour and the theoretical peak throughput of only up to 7 transactions per second.

Subfields: Computer Networks and Communications, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/efb1a85cf540fd4f901a78100a2e450d484aebac

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Citations in the corpus

Tendermint: Byzantine Fault Tolerance in the Age of Blockchains (2016, background): “Few have succeeded in putting the blockchain in context of classical consensus science until recently [102, 14, 67].”
A Vademecum on Blockchain Technologies: When, Which, and How (2019, background): “few comprehensive works exists [30], [45], [46]; one may find much more literature focusing respectively on permissionless [22] and permissioned [29], [47] environments.”
Energy Crowdsourcing and Peer-to-Peer Energy Trading in Blockchain-Enabled Smart Grids (2019, methodology): “, using the IBM Hyperledger Fabric [18], [19]), can be used to reduce energy consumption.”
PBFT vs Proof-of-Authority: Applying the CAP Theorem to Permissioned Blockchain (2018, neutral): “From a more formal perspective, Vukolić compares in [25] PoW with BFT-like approaches introducing the distinguishing property of consensus finality : the impossibility of reaching consensus without fully distributed agreement.”
An Overview of Blockchain Technology: Architecture, Consensus, and Future Trends (2017, methodology): “Table II gives a comparison between different consensus algorithms and we use the properties given by [32].”
A Survey of Distributed Consensus Protocols for Blockchain Networks (2019, background): “In summary, This paradigm shift has brought the design and analysis of blockchain consensus protocols into formal scientific research, echoing Cachin and Vukolić [19] that blockchain design should follow the rigor established by prevailing wisdom.”
A Review on the Use of Blockchain for the Internet of Things (2018, background): “However, this mining process makes the blockchain inefficient in throughput, scalability [78], and in terms of energy consumption, what is not desirable in an IoT”
BLOCKBENCH: A Framework for Analyzing Private Blockchains (2017, background): “Blockchain systems, on the other hand, employ a spectrum of Byzantine fault-tolerant protocols [50].”
SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains (2017, background): “He advocates the shift to classical BFT protocols that offer strong consistency, but notes challenges in their scalability which are discussed in a previous paper by the same author [132].”
Blockchain challenges and opportunities: a survey (2018, methodology): “Table 2 gives a comparison between different consensus algorithms and we use the properties given by [82].”
A review on consensus algorithm of blockchain (2017, background): “Some researchers have begun to study the underlying technologies such as the difficulty control of mining[8], the scalability of consensus algorithms [9] and the smart contract [10].”
A framework for analysing blockchain technology adoption: Integrating institutional, market and technical factors (2020, background): “…product-target offers (Sweet, 2018), whereas IBM has launched Blockchain as a Service (BaaS) on the Hyperledger Fabric open source blockchain architecture, to enable the setup of scalable, high throughput (Vukolić, 2015) trusted networks across private, public and government actors (Miller, 2017).”
FastFabric: Scaling Hyperledger Fabric to 20,000 Transactions per Second (2019, methodology): “Using a Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant (BFT) consensus algo-rithm is a critical performance bottleneck in HyperLedger [2].”