The problem of performing conditional transactions in private Blockchain-systems

Authors

  • П.И. Стеценко
  • Г.З. Халимов

Abstract

The problem of performing conditional transactions is presented. This problem prevents users of the most popular Blockchain-systems from performing conditional transactions in the closed, private Blockchain ledgers. The paper discusses the links of the presented problem with other problems and shows that it is not limited to the Ethereum Blockchain technology, but it can potentially extend to the closed, private Blockchain ledgers which use proof-of-stake consensus mechanism. The problem of performing conditional transactions can lead to the loss of digital assets or double-spending attacks. A possible way to prevent this problem is to create smart-contracts instead of using usual transactions, but this will add complexity and is only applicable to systems with the Turing-complete programming language.

References

S. Nakamoto. Bitcoin: a peer-to-peer electronic cash system, 2008. http://www.bitcoin.org.

G. Wood. Ethereum: A secure decentralised generalized transaction ledger final draft – under review, 2014. ttps://github.com/ethereum/wiki/wiki/White-Paper.

M. J. Fischer, N. A. Lynch, and M. S. Paterson. Impossibility of distributed consensus with one faulty process. J. ACM, 32(2):374–382, Apr. 1985.

C. Dwork, N. Lynch, and L. Stockmeyer. Consensus in the presence of partial synchrony. J. ACM, 35(2), Apr. 1988.

International Business Time Journal, 2015. http://www.ibtimes.co.uk/r3-connects-11-banksdistributed-ledger-using-ethereum-microsoft-azure-1539044.

M. Castro and B. Liskov. Practical byzantine fault tolerance and proactive recovery. ACM Trans. Comput. Syst., 20(4):398–461, Nov. 2002.

K. Croman, C. Decker, I. Eyal, A. E. Gencer, A. Juels, A. Kosba, A. Miller, P. Saxena, E. Shi, E. G. Sirer, D. Song, and R. Wattenhofer. On scaling decentralized blockchains. In 3rd Workshop on Bitcoin Research (BITCOIN), Barbados, February 2016.

M. Vukol´ıc. The quest for scalable blockchain fabric: Proof-of-work vs. BFT replication. In Proceedings of the IFIP WG 11.4Workshop on Open Research Problems in Network Security (iNetSec 2015), LNCS, 2016.

C. Decker, J. Seidel, and R. Wattenhofer. Bitcoin meets strong consistency. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Distributed Computing and Networking (ICDCN), page 13, 2016.

V. Gramoli, L. Bass, A. Fekete, and D. Sun. Rollup: Nondisruptive rolling upgrade with fast consensus-based dynamic reconfigurations. IEEE Trans. on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2015.

L. Lamport. The Part-Time parliament. ACM Transactions on Computer Systems, 16(2):133–169, May 1998.

D. Ongaro and J. Ousterhout. In search of an understandable consensus algo-rithm. In 2014 USENIX Annual Technical Conference (USENIX ATC 14), pages 305–319, Philadelphia, PA, 2014. USENIX Association.

X. Xu, C. Pautasso, L. Zhu, V. Gramoli, S. Chen, A. Ponomarev, and A. B. Tran. The blockchain as a software connector. In Proceedings of the 13th Working IEEE/IFIP Conference on Software Architecture (WICSA), April 2016.

C. Dwork and M. Naor. Pricing via processing or com-bating junk mail. In Proceedings of the 12th Annual International Cryptology Conference on Advances in Cryptology, CRYPTO ’92, pages 139–147, 1993.

A. Black. Hashcash – a denial of service countermeas-ure. Technical report, Cypherspace, 2002.

G.Wood. Ethereum: A secure decentralized generalized trans-action ledger, 2015. Yellow paper.

QuadrigaCX Bitcoin Trading Platform. https://www.quadrigacx.com/.

I. Eyal and E. G. Sirer. Majority is not enough: Bitcoin mining is vulnerable. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security – 18th International Conference, FC 2014, hrist hurch, Barbados, March 3-7, 2014, Re-vised Selected Papers, pages 436–454, 2014.

Ethereum Stack Exchange. https://ethereum. stackexchange.com/questions/332/what-is-the-difference-between-casper-and-tendermint /536

Wood G. Chain Reorganization Depth Expectations, 2015. https://blog.ethereum.org/2015/08/08/ chain-reorganisation-depth-expectations/.

J. A. Garay, A. Kiayias, and N. Leonardos. The Bitcoin backbone protocol: Analysis and applications. In Advances in Cryptology – EUROCRYPT 2015 – 34th Annual International Conference on the Theory and Applications of Cryptographic Techniques, Sofia, Bulgaria, April 26-30, 2015, Proceedings, Part II, pages 281–310, 2015.

I. Eyal, A. E. Gencer, E. G. Sirer, and R. van Renesse. Bitcoin-NG: A scalable blockchain protocol. In 13th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation (NSDI), 2016.

Downloads

How to Cite

Стеценко, П., & Халимов, Г. (2017). The problem of performing conditional transactions in private Blockchain-systems. Radiotekhnika, 2(189), 90–99. Retrieved from http://rt.nure.ua/article/view/183317

Issue

No. 189 (2017): Radiotekhnika

Section

Articles

License

Authors who publish with this journal agree to the following terms:

1. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication with the work simultaneously licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution License that allows others to share the work with an acknowledgement of the work's authorship and initial publication in this journal.

2. Authors are able to enter into separate, additional contractual arrangements for the non-exclusive distribution of the journal's published version of the work (e.g., post it to an institutional repository or publish it in a book), with an acknowledgement of its initial publication in this journal.

3. Authors are permitted and encouraged to post their work online (e.g., in institutional repositories or on their website) prior to and during the submission process, as it can lead to productive exchanges, as well as earlier and greater citation of published work (See The Effect of Open Access).