TY - GEN
T1 - Blockchain abbreviation
T2 - 16th IEEE International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, NCA 2017
AU - Amelchenko, Maxim
AU - Dolev, Shlomi
N1 - Publisher Copyright: © 2017 IEEE.
PY - 2017/12/8
Y1 - 2017/12/8
N2 - Blockchain's ever increasing size has become a major problem. Bitcoin [7], for example, has grown to 115120 MB as of May 2017, which is roughly 115 GB. This uncontrollable growth of the Blockchain is bound to become an issue in the future, as hard disks may become too small to store the entire Blockchain history and traversing the transactions databases may become increasingly slow. Already, there are lightweight clients in various Blockchain platforms (Bitcoin included), who do not store the entire chain locally but rely on a third party to send them the blocks they need. There are many issues with these clients, mainly security problems, since they go back to trusting a central authority rather than gaining trust from several distributed peers. These clients' knowledge of the Blockchain is solely based on some third party that should be trusted, while the conceptual base for Blockchain is trust distributing. In this paper we present two Blockchain abbreviation schemes. The first one is based on the Ethereum [8] project and proposes replacing the full Blockchain with a new Genesis block, which summarizes everyone's account balances at a certain point in time. One possible benefit is to use less communication while still storing the prefix of the old Blockchain (or signature of the Blockchain that can validate a version archived by other participants) in a local archive. Here we trade loss of transaction history for efficiency. Our second contribution is a UNIX based architecture using the file system, for implementing Blockchain. We demonstrate a Blockchain abbreviation technique for this architecture too.
AB - Blockchain's ever increasing size has become a major problem. Bitcoin [7], for example, has grown to 115120 MB as of May 2017, which is roughly 115 GB. This uncontrollable growth of the Blockchain is bound to become an issue in the future, as hard disks may become too small to store the entire Blockchain history and traversing the transactions databases may become increasingly slow. Already, there are lightweight clients in various Blockchain platforms (Bitcoin included), who do not store the entire chain locally but rely on a third party to send them the blocks they need. There are many issues with these clients, mainly security problems, since they go back to trusting a central authority rather than gaining trust from several distributed peers. These clients' knowledge of the Blockchain is solely based on some third party that should be trusted, while the conceptual base for Blockchain is trust distributing. In this paper we present two Blockchain abbreviation schemes. The first one is based on the Ethereum [8] project and proposes replacing the full Blockchain with a new Genesis block, which summarizes everyone's account balances at a certain point in time. One possible benefit is to use less communication while still storing the prefix of the old Blockchain (or signature of the Blockchain that can validate a version archived by other participants) in a local archive. Here we trade loss of transaction history for efficiency. Our second contribution is a UNIX based architecture using the file system, for implementing Blockchain. We demonstrate a Blockchain abbreviation technique for this architecture too.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85046551932&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - https://doi.org/10.1109/NCA.2017.8171382
DO - https://doi.org/10.1109/NCA.2017.8171382
M3 - Conference contribution
T3 - 2017 IEEE 16th International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, NCA 2017
SP - 1
EP - 7
BT - 2017 IEEE 16th International Symposium on Network Computing and Applications, NCA 2017
A2 - Avresky, Dimiter R.
A2 - Gkoulalas-Divanis, Aris
A2 - Correia, Miguel P.
Y2 - 30 October 2017 through 1 November 2017
ER -