
TL;DR
This paper identifies a new deterministic safety anomaly in private blockchains that can prevent dependent transactions from executing correctly, highlighting potential risks in controlled blockchain environments.
Contribution
It introduces the Blockchain Anomaly, a previously unrecognized issue affecting consensus safety in private blockchains, and explores smart contract solutions to mitigate it.
Findings
The Blockchain Anomaly can cause dependent transactions to fail.
Existing blockchains do not guarantee deterministic consensus safety.
Smart contracts can both suffer from and mitigate the anomaly.
Abstract
Most popular blockchain solutions, like Bitcoin, rely on proof-of-work, guaranteeing that the output of the consensus is agreed upon with high probability. However, this probability depends on the delivery of messages and that the computational power of the system is sufficiently scattered among pools of nodes in the network so that no pool can mine more blocks faster than the crowd. New approaches, like Ethereum, generalise the proof-of-work approach by letting individuals deploy their own private blockchain with high transaction throughput. As companies are starting to deploy private chains, it has become crucial to better understand the guarantees blockchains offer in such a small and controlled environment. In this paper, we present the \emph{Blockchain Anomaly}, an execution that we experienced when building our private chain at NICTA/Data61. Even though this anomaly has never…
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