The Generals' Scuttlebutt
Sandro Coretti, Aggelos Kiayias, Cristopher Moore, Alexander Russell
Abstract
One of the most successful applications of peer-to-peer communication networks is in the context of blockchain protocols, which-in Satoshi Nakamoto's own words-rely on the "nature of information being easy to spread and hard to stifle." Significant efforts were invested in the last decade into analyzing the security of these protocols, and invariably the security arguments known for longest-chain Nakamoto-style consensus use an idealization of this tenet. Unfortunately, the real-world implementations of peer-topeer gossip-style networks used by blockchain protocols rely on a number of ad-hoc attack mitigation strategies that leave a glaring gap between the idealized communication layer assumed in formal security arguments for blockchains and the real world, where a wide array of attacks have been showcased.