Descripción del proyecto
Algoritmos sin consenso para transferir activos con fiabilidad
Bitcóin y otros protocolos basados en cadenas de bloques emplean un sistema de transferencia de activos descentralizado. El problema reside en prohibir a un participante que realice un doble gasto. El proyecto AT2, financiado con fondos europeos, aborda esta cuestión. Bajo la denominación de transferencia asíncrona fiable, se trata de un protocolo genérico asíncrono que resuelve el problema de la transmisión causal segura. Más concretamente, el proyecto está desarrollando una clase de algoritmos sin consenso, ya que este no es necesario para la transferencia de activos. El proyecto ha mostrado que llega con resolver un problema llamado transmisión causal segura para crear confianza en cualquier aplicación toquenizada, lo cual es una opción mucho más simple. El objetivo de este proyecto es prepararlo para su comercialización.
Objetivo
Although Nakamoto’s original blockchain protocol has spurred significant innovation and financial interest in the last decade, its energy consumption becomes problematic. Besides, transaction latencies are prohibitively high and the system sustains a very low throughput. We have witnessed hundreds of alternative solutions in the last decade. Each seeks to reduce energy consumption, to obtain lower latency, or to improve throughput. All proposed alternatives, however, sacrifice either trustworthiness or efficiency. In retrospect, this is not surprising. All these solutions seek to solve a notoriously difficult problem: consensus. In short, the set of nodes in the network have to agree on the same position of a block in the chain, despite the possibility of malicious behaviour of some of the nodes, or network delays. The consensus problem has been the most studied problem in distributed computing, and many impossibility and lower bound results were established. These results translate into inherent trade-offs between trust and efficiency. In the context of our ERC AOC (Adversary-Oriented Computing) project (advanced grant), we worked on classifying distributed computing problems according to their hardness. While doing so, we revisited the issue of implementing a trustworthy payment system, i.e. the problem solved in Nakamoto’s paper. This led us to a very interesting discovery: Current blockchain protocols are tackling a problem, i.e. consensus, which is unnecessarily strong for their purpose of building a payment system. More specifically, we have shown that it is enough to solve a problem called secure causal broadcast to implement trust in any tokenized application. This is significantly simpler than consensus. We devised a generic asynchronous protocol to solve the secure causal broadcast problem, which we called AT2, Asynchronous Trustworthy Transactions, which we patented. The goal of this project is to pave the path to its commercialization.
Programa(s)
Régimen de financiación
ERC-POC-LS - ERC Proof of Concept Lump Sum PilotInstitución de acogida
1015 Lausanne
Suiza