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ComChain: A blockchain with Byzantine fault‐tolerant reconfiguration
Author(s) -
Vizier Guillaume,
Gramoli Vincent
Publication year - 2019
Publication title -
concurrency and computation: practice and experience
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.309
H-Index - 67
eISSN - 1532-0634
pISSN - 1532-0626
DOI - 10.1002/cpe.5494
Subject(s) - blockchain , control reconfiguration , block (permutation group theory) , computer science , byzantine fault tolerance , set (abstract data type) , database transaction , protocol (science) , resilience (materials science) , distributed computing , computer security , fault tolerance , database , embedded system , mathematics , medicine , physics , geometry , alternative medicine , pathology , programming language , thermodynamics
Summary Selecting which blockchain participants can decide upon a new block is a difficult problem. Consortium blockchains need the participants to be predetermined while public blockchains incentivize all participants to waste their resources to decide every block. In this paper, we introduce the community blockchain that allows potentially all participants to decide upon “some” block while restricting the set of participants deciding upon “one” block. To this end, we propose a blockchain reconfiguration, a Byzantine consensus protocol that allows to dynamically change the set of blockchain participants deciding upon the upcoming blocks. The resulting blockchain, called ComChain , is resilience optimal and transitions through different configurations of participants recorded in dedicated blocks so that each configuration decides upon its subsequent transaction blocks. We evaluate an implementation that adds reconfiguration to the Red Belly Blockchain and demonstrates its practical performance in a distributed system.