CSE 552 preparation for reading Blockchains CSE 552 preparation for reading

Systematization of knowledge A special kind of paper that appears in IEEE S&P Doesn’t have new research Surveys existing research Provides a new viewpoint not necessarily understood by the purveyors of that research A survey is useful to introduce yourself to a new area

A blockchain is a replicated state machine ...but with only probabilistic properties ... The key is to ensure global consensus on the sequence of inputs Header

Each block can succeed only one log prefix hash ...

Consensus is on the hardest chain to produce hash PoW ... “Work” is to find a such that the hash of the is less than the current target nonce block

Participation is motivated by payment hash PoW ... $$$ for miner $ Adding a block to the chain (mining) lets you add a transaction creating currency in your personal account A transaction can also specify that the miner gets whatever “change” is left over from running it

Distributed systems in a blockchain The blockchain itself The dissemination network Lets clients send transactions to miners Lets miners publicize the blocks they mine