ACCEL: Accelerating the Bitcoin Blockchain for High-throughput, Low-latency Applications
01 January 2019
The Bitcoin blockchain is a secure, distributed ledger that enable trusted transactions across untrusted entities. However, many envisaged applications in networking and real time monitoring need much faster transaction confirmation than that of the current Bitcoin blockchain. In this paper, we present a high-throughput, low-latency, deterministic confirmation mechanism, ACCEL, for accelerating Bitcoin's block confirmation mechanism. Our key idea for achieving faster confirmation is the quick identification of singular blocks that provably belong to the blockchain, relying on the fact that the end-to-end latency delay of the Internet in general, and the Bitcoin miners in particular, is substantially lower than the target Inter block spacing of 10 minutes. Beyond the Bitcoin blockchain, ACCEL is especially suitable for low latency, permissioned blockchains, where it can exploit the low latency to greatly improve the throughput. We evaluate ACCEL's performance with extensive simulations and with an optimized implementation built with minimal changes to and fully compatible with the existing Bitcoin blockchain. We show that with appropriate bounds on the end-to-end latency, it is possible to reduce transaction confirmation latencies to milliseconds with ACCEL, and so meet the performance needs of a wide range of applications.
