Exploring Cutting-Edge Blockchain Technology: Key Papers and Patents | News Bytes

To understand blockchain-based technologies, it is important to understand the latest and greatest in blockchain technology and what problems they solve. This can be a complicated process, given how advanced the systems have gotten, as well as the difficult process of parsing the large amounts of information available on the internet. The references below can serve as a primer for understanding the current state of the art.

Bitcoin White Paper

**Transactions Hashed in a Merkle Tree**

The Bitcoin whitepaper outlines the steps that allowed for peer-to-peer transactions to be performed without the need for a third party to act as a source of trust and prevent double-spending. This is a must-read paper that covers the basics of how a blockchain project would work. From the formation of blocks, verification of new blocks, validation using proof-of-work, and networking.

Prism

Prism is a very good second paper to read because it is a new Proof-of-Work protocol that is on the cutting edge of Blockchain technology. This was accomplished by deconstructing the systems laid out in the Bitcoin white paper and then scaling them up to maximize their potential. Prism's throughput is near optimal while still managing to maintain an extremely small confirmation error probability. With this system, the transactions per second are limited by the communications speed of nodes. Systems like Bitcoin try to increase the throughput but inadvertently also increase the confirmation error probability.

HashCore

HashCore is a Proof-of-Work function that was created to make the mining market for Proof-of-Work cryptocurrencies more accessible and competitive. It needed to be created because people realized that they could create (ASIC) machines that were specifically optimized to compute hashes, giving them an extreme advantage in terms of mining power. The prices and availability of these machines made it much harder for a general user to compete in the mining of a new block. HashCore solved this problem by creating a Proof-of-Work function optimized around the x86 processor, a widespread and available piece of hardware.

Difficulty Control

One issue with the original Bitcoin whitepaper was that it assumed there would be a static difficulty, meaning that throughout the life of a blockchain system, the difficulty of solving the Proof-of-Work function would be the same. This is not true, and we can see that the actual implementation of Bitcoin includes an adaptive difficulty adjustment that changes the number of blocks minted based on how long it took to mint the previous blocks. This type of dynamic difficulty is susceptible to an attack known as a coin hopping attack, where someone switches off mining a coin, generally to mine another one; after some time, the difficulty of mining the first coin is decreased. When they switch back to the original coin with the lower difficulty, mining becomes much more profitable. This paper proposes a new way to calculate difficulty using the linear least squares method, which is more resistant to attacks and maintains a more consistent block rate.

Coded Merkle Tree

Light nodes are nodes that interact with the blockchain but do not store the entire history of the blockchain on them; they only store what is necessary to operate. They have a problem in that they are slow to validate transactions based on the fact they don't store the entire history of the blockchain.

Coded Merkle Tree is a hash accumulator, where you add them to the header of a block, which increases the speed of verification for light nodes to constant time, and significantly increases a chain’s defense against data availability attacks.

This is important because light nodes give people access to the cryptocurrency system without having to have a large amount of storage or time (sometimes hours) to download the entire history of the blockchain. Thus, making adoption easier for new users.

Mining in Logarithmic Space

One major issue with common Blockchain implementations is that the consensus data grows at a constant linear rate over time. This affects scalability and makes it harder and harder for new nodes to join the longer the chain has existed. With modern-day visionaries proclaiming that, eventually, all financial transactions will happen on the blockchain, this would start to make it extremely prohibitive for new people to join the ecosystem. This paper covers a system where you can decrease the size of the consensus data in a way that still maintains the blockchain’s security. It changes the way the consensus data is stored from linear to polylogarithmic, which is an exponential improvement.

Proof-Of-Useful-Work

One of the biggest problems with a Proof-of-Work system is that it uses large amounts of CPU time/Energy to mine new blocks. This paper puts forward a provably secure Proof-of-Useful-Work protocol that is a generic optimization engine that can be used for a variety of hard optimization problems.

Proof-of-Stake

Proof-of-Stake is a methodology for validating new blocks on a chain, and instead of having every user race in a competition of CPU/GPU computing power, the users will stake their current holdings on the blockchain. Then the system will choose a random number of stakeholders from the group that staked some amount, usually weighted with better odds the more you stake. These individuals will then mine/validate the next block. If one of them tries to cheat and validate the block incorrectly, they will be caught by the other validators, and they will lose the amount they staked.

This system works because the people who are validating the blocks must have large amounts of capital invested into the blockchain system, and if they end up cheating the validation process, it will cause people not to trust the blockchain, crashing the value, making them lose more money than they could make by validating an incorrect block.

This paper goes over how proof-of-stake works, its different implementations, and future improvements.

BLAKE3

BLAKE3 is a much faster hashing function that is over 14 times faster than SHA-256, an industry standard. This would allow programs that need to check file integrity, authenticate messages, and other similar functions to process the information much faster. Leading to lighter-weight applications that can be more accessible to people with lower-end technology.

Quantum

This paper goes over stateful hash-based signatures that will not be broken by the development of quantum computers. This is pertinent not only to blockchain systems but also to all of computing since hash-based signatures are the backbone of cyber security. Quantum computing will revolutionize optimization problems, allowing us to make use of extremely large data sets. It is also important that we don’t forget that these machines can be used to optimize the breaking of hash signatures. Finding new and better systems to secure information online will always have to improve with the development of better and faster technology.

SoK: Blockchain Governance

This paper is a Systematization of Knowledge for blockchain governance, which is an overall analysis of how a specific chain covers these main things: Voting Systems, Incentives, Timeliness, and Security.

Survey on Cryptocurrency Networking

This paper is an overview of cryptocurrency networking, which will break down the current state-of-the-art implementation, as well as the challenges to be overcome. For systems like block and transaction propagation, even if the systems for generating blocks and transactions are optimized, if they can’t be sent across a network to the other peers in the blockchain network in an efficient and low bandwidth way, it will seriously affect people quality of life, and willingness to adopt these systems.

US20170187535A1

This patent is about systems and methods that would enable parties that have little or no control or trust over the other actions to enter and enforce agreements that are controlled or require input from some third party. This means that you create a system where people feel like they are interacting with a third party, but in truth, the third party is only facilitating a transaction between two people who don’t even know they are having a transaction.

US20200097951A1

This patent is held by Microsoft for using human beings' activity data, giving the user a task in order to complete the mining process of a cryptocurrency system. This could be used to create systems that promote activity and help prevent issues that come along with inactivity. Some people might view this as dystopian, but most ideas can be twisted into a dystopian nightmare; using technology to help push people to become more active can help improve people's quality of life.

Modern Blockchain Systems