Ouroboros: A Provably Secure Proof-of-Stake Blockchain Protocol

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Aggelos Kiayias, Alexander Russell, Bernardo David, Roman Oliynykov
Jonathan Katz, Hovav Shacham (eds.)
Advances in Cryptology – CRYPTO 2017, pages 357–388
Lecture Notes in Computer Science 10401
Springer
2017

We present “Ouroboros”, the first blockchain protocol based on proof of stake with rigorous security guarantees. We establish security properties for the protocol comparable to those achieved by the bitcoin blockchain protocol. As the protocol provides a “proof of stake” blockchain discipline, it offers qualitative efficiency advantages over blockchains based on proof of physical resources (e.g., proof of work). We also present a novel reward mechanism for incentivizing Proof of Stake protocols and we prove that, given this mechanism, honest behavior is an approximate Nash equilibrium, thus neutralizing attacks such as selfish mining.

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book Lecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)