On Trees, Chains and Fast Transactions in the Blockchain
A fundamental open problem in the area of blockchain protocols is whether the Bitcoin protocol is the only solution for building a secure transaction ledger. A recently proposed and widely considered alternative is the GHOST protocol which, notably, was proposed to be at the core of Ethereum as well as other recent proposals for improved Bitcoin like systems. The GHOST variant is touted as offering superior performance compared to Bitcoin (potentially offering block production speed up by a factor of more than 40) without a security loss. Motivated by this, in this work, we study from a provable security point of view the GHOST protocol.
IACR Cryptol. ePrint Arch.