On Scaling Decentralized Blockchains (A Position Paper)
The increasing popularity of blockchain based cryptocurrencies has made scalability a primary and urgent concern. We analyze how fundamental and circumstantial bottlenecks in Bitcoin limit the ability of its current peer to peer overlay network to support substantially higher throughputs and lower latencies. Our results suggest that reparameterization of block size and intervals should be viewed only as a first increment toward achieving next generation, high load blockchain protocols, and major advances will additionally require a basic rethinking of technical approaches. We offer a structured perspective on the design space for such approaches. Within this perspective, we enumerate and briefly discuss a number of recently proposed protocol ideas and offer several new ideas and open challenges.
Financial Cryptography Workshops