A Decentralized Blockchain with High Throughput and Fast Confirmation

Explore a conference talk from USENIX ATC '20 that introduces Conflux, a revolutionary decentralized blockchain system designed for high throughput and rapid transaction confirmation. Delve into the innovative consensus protocol that optimistically processes concurrent blocks without discarding forks and adaptively assigns weights based on the Tree-Graph ledger structure. Learn how Conflux's adaptive weight mechanism detects and counters liveness attacks by dynamically switching between optimistic and conservative strategies. Discover the impressive performance results from Amazon EC2 cluster evaluations, showcasing Conflux's ability to achieve a block throughput of 9.6Mbps and process up to 3480 transactions per second with sub-minute confirmation times. Gain insights into blockchain performance challenges, consensus algorithms, and the technical innovations that make Conflux a promising solution for scalable and efficient blockchain systems.

Intro
An Ideal Blockchain System
Blockchain Performance Problem
Bitcoin and Ethereum Background
Standard Nakamoto Consensus
Longest Chain is Not Safe with Fast Generation fork
GHOST Consensus
GHOST is Weak to Liveness Attacks
One Fix: Structured GHOST Approach
Greedy Heaviest Adaptive SubTree (GHAST)
Determine Weights from Past Sub-graphs
Trusted Block Generation Time: TimerChain
Conflux Ordering Algorithm
Implementation & Optimizations
Experimental Environment
Throughput, Latency, and Scalability
Conclusion