Bitcoin Meets Strong Consistency
This addresses the slow transaction speed issue for Bitcoin users, offering a potential solution for real-world payments, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing blockchain technology.
The paper tackles the problem of Bitcoin's slow transaction confirmation by proposing PeerCensus, a system built on the Bitcoin blockchain that enables strong consistency, allowing for real-time payments in a variant called Discoin where committed transactions stay committed.
The Bitcoin system only provides eventual consistency. For everyday life, the time to confirm a Bitcoin transaction is prohibitively slow. In this paper we propose a new system, built on the Bitcoin blockchain, which enables strong consistency. Our system, PeerCensus, acts as a certification authority, manages peer identities in a peer-to-peer network, and ultimately enhances Bitcoin and similar systems with strong consistency. Our extensive analysis shows that PeerCensus is in a secure state with high probability. We also show how Discoin, a Bitcoin variant that decouples block creation and transaction confirmation, can be built on top of PeerCensus, enabling real-time payments. Unlike Bitcoin, once transactions in Discoin are committed, they stay committed.