Year: 2017
Type: article
Abstract: At the heart of the Bitcoin is a blockchain protocol, a protocol for achieving consensus on a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. To the extent that a blockchain protocol is used for applications such as contract signing and making certain transactions (such as house sales) public, we need to understand what guarantees the protocol gives us in terms of agents' knowledge. Here, we provide a complete characterization of agent's knowledge when running a blockchain protocol using a variant of common knowledge that takes into account the fact that agents can enter and leave the system, it is not known which agents are in fact following the protocol (some agents may want to deviate if they can gain by doing so), and the fact that the guarantees provided by blockchain protocols are probabilistic. We then consider some scenarios involving contracts and show that this level of knowledge suffices for some scenarios, but not others.
DOI: 10.4204/eptcs.251.22
Authors: Joseph Y. Halpern, Rafael Pass
Institution: Cornell University
Language: English
Subfield: Information Systems
Field: Computer Science
Domain: Physical Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
Awards: G1523888516, G1571818368, CAREER: Computation and Collaboration in the Era of the Internet, G2455395424, G2842714845, G2918241329, G335988044, G3392305090, G3424441068, G4227820399, G4456972112, G4760623602, G497434933, G6071252945, G6187160294, G657448715, G6671297155, G6723036550, G707342011, G7176241603, G7452299184, G7830320759, G7950983496, ICES: Large: Computation, Language, and Awareness in Games, G8575014924
OpenAlex ID: W2738498529