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Issue #116
Paper of the Week:
Paper Title: Stochastic Modelling of BlockchainConsensus.
TLDR:
Blockchain and general purpose distributed ledgers are foundational technologies which bring significant innovation in the infrastructures and other underpinnings of our socio-economic systems.
These P2P technologies are able to securely diffuse information within and across networks, without need for trustees or central authorities to enforce consensus.
This contribution proposes a minimalistic stochastic model to understand the dynamics of blockchain-based consensus.
By leveraging on random-walk theory, it models block propagation delay on different network topologies and provides a classification of blockchain systems in terms of two emergent properties.
Firstly, it identifies two performing regimes: a functional regime corresponding to an optimal system function; and a non-functional regime characterised by a congested or branched state of sub-optimal blockchains.
Secondly, it discovers a phase transition during the emergence of consensus and numerically investigate the corresponding critical point.
The results provide important insights into the consensus mechanism and sub-optimal states in decentralised systems.
Authors: Claudio J. Tessone*, Paolo Tasca†, and Flavio Iannelli*,
Affiliations: * University of Zurich and † University College London.
Security:
1. Paper Title: TokenHook: Secure ERC-20 smart contract.
Summary: An ERC-20 designed to be secure against known vulnerabilities, and can serve as a second reference implementation to provide software diversity.
Authors: Reza Rahimian* and Jeremy Clark*
Affiliations: * Concordia University.
2. Paper Title: A First Look into the Structural Properties and Resilience of Blockchain Overlays.
Summary: The most important overlay structural properties and the resilience to targeted attacks of seven distinct blockchain networks.
Authors: Aristodemos Paphitis*, Nicolas Kourtellis†, and Michael Sirivianos*,
Affiliations: * Cyprus University of Technology and † Telefonica Research.
Privacy:
No papers.
Scalability:
No papers.
Proofs:
No papers.
Consensus:
1. Paper Title: SoK: Understanding BFT Consensus in the Age of Blockchains.
Summary: This paper conducts a systematic and comprehensive study on BFT consensus protocols with a specific focus on the blockchain era.
Authors: Gang Wang*
Affiliations: * University of Connecticut.
2. Paper Title: Stochastic Performance Modeling for Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance Consensus in Blockchain.
Summary: This paper describes a simple stochastic performance model of the PBFT consensus mechanism, which is refined as not only a queueing system with complicated service times but also a level-independent quasi-birth-and-death (QBD) process.
Authors: Fan-Qi Ma*, Quan-Lin Li†, Yi-Han Liu†, and Yan-Xia Chang†,
Affiliations: * Yanshan University and † Beijing University of Technology.
Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: High-Frequency Connectedness between Bitcoin and Other Top-Traded Crypto Assets during the COVID-19 Crisis.
Summary: This work applies the Diagonal-BEKK model to data from the pre-COVID and COVID-19 periods, and identifies significant changes in patterns of co-movements and correlations during the pandemic period.
Authors: Paraskevi Katsiampa*, Larisa Yarovaya†, and Damian Zięba‡,
Affiliations: * University of Sheffield, † University of Southampton, and ‡ University of Warsaw.
Research Talks:
Upcoming Events:
Decentralising the Internet with IPFS and Filecoin workshop at IFIP Networking 2021.
ACM Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT 2021). Call for Papers
Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology (CBT 2021). Call for Papers
Jobs:
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