Nowadays, sharding is deemed as a promising way to save traditional blockchain protocols from their low scalability. However, such technique also brings several potential risks and huge communication overheads. An improper design may give rise to the inconsistent state among different committees. Further, the communication overheads arising from cross-shard transactions unfortunately reduce the system's performance. In this paper, we first summarize five essential issues that all sharding blockchain designers face. For each issue, we discuss its key challenge and propose our suggested solutions. In order to break the performance bottlenecks, we propose a reputation mechanism for selecting leaders. The term of reputation in our design reflects each node's honest computation resources. In addition, we introduce a referee committee and partial sets in each committee, and design a recovery procedure in case the leader is malicious. Under the design, we prove that malicious leaders will not hurt the system and will be evicted. Furthermore, we conduct a series of simulations to evaluate our design. The results show that selecting leaders by the reputation can dramatically improve the system performance.
翻译:目前,碎片法被认为是一种很有希望的方法,可以将传统的块链协议从较低的缩放性中拯救出来。然而,这种技术也带来了若干潜在的风险和巨大的通信管理费用。设计不当可能会造成不同委员会之间的不一致状态。此外,交叉碎裂交易产生的通信管理费用不幸地降低了系统的绩效。在本文件中,我们首先总结了所有碎片化的块链设计师面临的五个基本问题。我们讨论其关键挑战,并提出我们建议的解决办法。为了打破业绩瓶颈,我们建议了一种挑选领导人的名声机制。我们设计中的名声反映了每一个节点的诚实计算资源。此外,我们在每个委员会中引入了一个裁判委员会和部分设置,并设计了一个回收程序,以防领导人恶意行为。根据设计,我们证明恶意领导人不会伤害系统,而是会被驱逐出去。此外,我们进行一系列模拟来评估我们的设计。结果显示,通过名声选择领导人可以极大地改善系统绩效。