Practical Settlement Bounds for Proof-of-Work Blockchains

Peter Gazi, Ling Ren, Alexander Russell

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

Abstract

Nakamoto proof-of-work ledger consensus currently underlies the majority of deployed cryptocurrencies and smart-contract blockchains. While a long and fruitful line of work has succeeded to identify its exact security region-that is, the set of parametrizations under which it possesses asymptotic security-the existing theory does not provide concrete settlement time guarantees that are tight enough to inform practice. In this work we provide a new approach for obtaining concrete and practical settlement time guarantees suitable for reasoning about deployed systems. We give an efficient method for computing explicit upper bounds on settlement time as a function of primary system parameters: honest and adversarial computational power and a bound on network delays. We implement this computational method and provide a comprehensive sample of concrete bounds for several settings of interest. We also analyze a well-known attack strategy to provide lower bounds on the settlement times. For Bitcoin, for example, our upper and lower bounds are within 90 seconds of each other for 1-hour settlement assuming 10 second network delays and a 10% adversary. In comparison, the best prior result has a gap of 2 hours in the upper and lower bounds with the same parameters.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Title of host publicationCCS 2022 - Proceedings of the 2022 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1217-1230
Number of pages14
ISBN (Electronic)9781450394505
DOIs
StatePublished - Nov 7 2022
Event28th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2022 - Los Angeles, United States
Duration: Nov 7 2022Nov 11 2022

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
ISSN (Print)1543-7221

Conference

Conference28th ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2022
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityLos Angeles
Period11/7/2211/11/22

Keywords

  • bitcoin
  • blockchains
  • proof of work

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Software
  • Computer Networks and Communications

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