Solida: A Blockchain Protocol Based on Reconfigurable Byzantine Consensus
This addresses security and efficiency problems for decentralized cryptocurrency users, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing blockchain and consensus methods.
The paper tackles Bitcoin's long confirmation times and incentive issues by proposing Solida, a blockchain protocol based on reconfigurable Byzantine consensus with proof-of-work, which improves confirmation time and ensures safety and liveness under adversarial control of less than one-third of mining power.
The decentralized cryptocurrency Bitcoin has experienced great success but also encountered many challenges. One of the challenges has been the long confirmation time. Another challenge is the lack of incentives at certain steps of the protocol, raising concerns for transaction withholding, selfish mining, etc. To address these challenges, we propose Solida, a decentralized blockchain protocol based on reconfigurable Byzantine consensus augmented by proof-of-work. Solida improves on Bitcoin in confirmation time, and provides safety and liveness assuming the adversary control less than (roughly) one-third of the total mining power.