TY - GEN
T1 - You Sank My Battleship! A Case Study to Evaluate State Channels as a Scaling Solution for Cryptocurrencies
AU - McCorry, Patrick
AU - Buckland, Chris
AU - Bakshi, Surya
AU - Wüst, Karl
AU - Miller, Andrew
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2020, International Financial Cryptography Association.
PY - 2020
Y1 - 2020
N2 - Off-chain protocols (or so-called Layer 2) are heralded as a scaling solution for cryptocurrencies. One prominent approach, state channels, allows a group of parties to transact amongst themselves and the global blockchain is only used as a last resort to self-enforce any disputed transactions. To evaluate state channels as a scaling solution, we provide a proof of concept implementation for a two-player battleship game. It fits a category of applications that are not considered reasonable to execute on the blockchain, but it is widely perceived as an ideal application for off-chain protocols. We explore the minimal modifications required to deploy the battleship game as a state channel and propose a new state channel construction, Kitsune, which combines features from existing constructions. While in the optimistic case we demonstrate the battleship game can be played efficiently in a state channel, the requirement for unanimous off-chain agreement introduces new economic and time-based attacks that can render the game as unreasonable to play.
AB - Off-chain protocols (or so-called Layer 2) are heralded as a scaling solution for cryptocurrencies. One prominent approach, state channels, allows a group of parties to transact amongst themselves and the global blockchain is only used as a last resort to self-enforce any disputed transactions. To evaluate state channels as a scaling solution, we provide a proof of concept implementation for a two-player battleship game. It fits a category of applications that are not considered reasonable to execute on the blockchain, but it is widely perceived as an ideal application for off-chain protocols. We explore the minimal modifications required to deploy the battleship game as a state channel and propose a new state channel construction, Kitsune, which combines features from existing constructions. While in the optimistic case we demonstrate the battleship game can be played efficiently in a state channel, the requirement for unanimous off-chain agreement introduces new economic and time-based attacks that can render the game as unreasonable to play.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85082998678&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-43725-1_4
DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-43725-1_4
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85082998678
SN - 9783030437244
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 35
EP - 49
BT - Financial Cryptography and Data Security - FC 2019 International Workshops, VOTING and WTSC, Revised Selected Papers
A2 - Bracciali, Andrea
A2 - Clark, Jeremy
A2 - Pintore, Federico
A2 - Rønne, Peter B.
A2 - Sala, Massimiliano
PB - Springer
T2 - 4th Workshop on Advances in Secure Electronic Voting, VOTING 2019 and the 3rd Workshop on Trusted Smart Contracts, WTSC 2019, held at the 23rd International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, FC 2019
Y2 - 18 February 2019 through 22 February 2019
ER -