Generalizing Weighted Trees: A Bridge from Bitcoin to GHOST
Ignacio Amores-Sesar, Christian Cachin, Anna Parker

TL;DR
This paper introduces a new family of blockchain protocols that incorporate the entire block tree structure with weighted blocks, improving throughput and security over Bitcoin and GHOST by controlling fork influence.
Contribution
It presents a novel protocol family called Medium, generalizing Bitcoin and GHOST, with enhanced security and throughput by considering the full block tree structure.
Findings
Protocols in this family achieve higher throughput than Bitcoin at the same security level.
They resist attacks that threaten GHOST.
The protocols enable customizable security and performance trade-offs.
Abstract
Despite the tremendous interest in cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum today, many aspects of the underlying consensus protocols are poorly understood. Therefore, the search for protocols that improve either throughput or security (or both) continues. Bitcoin always selects the longest chain (i.e., the one with most work). Forks may occur when two miners extend the same block simultaneously, and the frequency of forks depends on how fast blocks are propagated in the network. In the GHOST protocol, used by Ethereum, all blocks involved in the fork contribute to the security. However, the greedy chain selection rule of GHOST does not consider the full information available in the block tree, which has led to some concerns about its security. This paper introduces a new family of protocols, called Medium, which takes the structure of the whole block tree into account, by weighting…
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