Stateless Distributed Ledgers
This addresses a scalability and security issue for nodes joining public distributed ledgers, but it is incremental as it builds on existing consensus mechanisms.
The paper tackles the problem of new nodes retrieving the current state in distributed ledgers without storing full history, defining weak, strong, and probabilistic stateless variants and analyzing them across consensus types.
In public distributed ledger technologies (DLTs), such as Blockchains, nodes can join and leave the network at any time. A major challenge occurs when a new node joining the network wants to retrieve the current state of the ledger. Indeed, that node may receive conflicting information from honest and Byzantine nodes, making it difficult to identify the current state. In this paper, we are interested in protocols that are stateless, i.e., a new joining node should be able to retrieve the current state of the ledger just using a fixed amount of data that characterizes the ledger (such as the genesis block in Bitcoin). We define three variants of stateless DLTs: weak, strong, and probabilistic. Then, we analyze this property for DLTs using different types of consensus.