Bitcoin-NG: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol

Authors: 

Ittay Eyal, Adem Efe Gencer, Emin Gün Sirer, and Robbert van Renesse, Cornell University

Abstract: 

Cryptocurrencies, based on and led by Bitcoin, have shown promise as infrastructure for pseudonymous online payments, cheap remittance, trustless digital asset exchange, and smart contracts. However, Bitcoin-derived blockchain protocols have inherent scalability limits that trade off between throughput and latency, which withhold the realization of this potential.

This paper presents Bitcoin-NG (Next Generation), a new blockchain protocol designed to scale. Bitcoin-NG is a Byzantine fault tolerant blockchain protocol that is robust to extreme churn and shares the same trust model as Bitcoin.

In addition to Bitcoin-NG, we introduce several novel metrics of interest in quantifying the security and efficiency of Bitcoin-like blockchain protocols. We implement Bitcoin-NG and perform large-scale experiments at 15% the size of the operational Bitcoin system, using unchanged clients of both protocols. These experiments demonstrate that Bitcoin-NG scales optimally, with bandwidth limited only by the capacity of the individual nodes and latency limited only by the propagation time of the network.

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BibTeX
@inproceedings {194906,
author = {Ittay Eyal and Adem Efe Gencer and Emin Gun Sirer and Robbert Van Renesse},
title = {{Bitcoin-NG}: A Scalable Blockchain Protocol},
booktitle = {13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI 16)},
year = {2016},
isbn = {978-1-931971-29-4},
address = {Santa Clara, CA},
pages = {45--59},
url = {https://www.usenix.org/conference/nsdi16/technical-sessions/presentation/eyal},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar,
}
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