Goshawk: A novel efficient, robust and flexible blockchain protocol

Cencen Wan, Shuyang Tang, Yuncong Zhang, Chen Pan, Zhiqiang Liu, Yu Long, Zhen Liu, Yu Yu

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

8 Scopus citations

Abstract

Proof of Work (PoW), a fundamental blockchain protocol, has been widely applied and thoroughly testified in various decentralized cryptocurrencies, due to its intriguing merits including trustworthy sustainability, robustness against Sybil attack, delicate incentive-compatibility, and openness to any participant. Meanwhile, PoW-powered blockchains still suffer from poor efficiency, potential selfish mining, to-be-optimized fairness and extreme inconvenience of protocol upgrading. Therefore, it is of great interest to design new PoW-driven blockchain protocol to address or relieve the above issues so as to make it more applicable and feasible. To do so, we present Goshawk, a novel hybrid consensus protocol, in which a two-layer chain structure with two-level PoW mining strategy and a ticket-voting mechanism are elaborately combined. We show that this newly-proposed protocol has the merits of high efficiency, strong robustness against “51%” attack of computation power, as well as good flexibility for future protocol updating. As far as we know, Goshawk is the first blockchain protocol with these three key properties. Last but not the least, this scheme has been implemented and deployed in the testnet of the public blockchain project Hcash(https://github.com/HcashOrg) for months, and has demonstrated its stability and high efficiency with such real-world test.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInformation Security and Cryptology - 14th International Conference, Inscrypt 2018, Revised Selected Papers
EditorsFuchun Guo, Moti Yung, Xinyi Huang
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages49-69
Number of pages21
ISBN (Print)9783030142339
DOIs
StatePublished - 2019
Externally publishedYes
Event14th International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology, Inscrypt 2018 - Fuzhou, China
Duration: 14 Dec 201817 Dec 2018

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume11449 LNCS
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference14th International Conference on Information Security and Cryptology, Inscrypt 2018
Country/TerritoryChina
CityFuzhou
Period14/12/1817/12/18

Keywords

  • Blockchain
  • Consensus protocol
  • Hybrid consensus
  • Proof of work
  • Ticket-voting mechanism

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