StreamChain: Do Blockchains Need Blocks?
StreamChain: Do Blockchains Need Blocks?
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StreamChain：区块链需要区块吗？
DOI：
10.1145/3284764.3284765
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发表时间：
2018
期刊：
影响因子：
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通讯作者：
M. Vukolic
中科院分区：
文献类型：
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作者：
Z. István;A. Sorniotti;M. Vukolic
区块粒度的处理和区块链似乎是不可分割的。区块的最初作用是分摊加密的成本（例如，解决工作量证明），并使数据传输在地理分布环境中更有效。虽然区块是摊销这些成本的简单而强大的工具，但在今天的许可分布式账本中，通常既不是地理分布式的，也不需要工作量证明，在区块上操作的好处被它们引入的巨大延迟所掩盖。我们的建议是将分布式账本处理范例从块处理切换到流事务处理，并仅依靠批处理（即块形成）来分摊提交操作的磁盘访问成本。这种范式转变使端到端延迟减少了一个数量级以上，并为许可分类账开辟了新的用例。我们使用Hyperledger Fabric演示了我们的想法的概念验证，在保持相对较高的吞吐量（即接近1500 tps）的同时，实现了小于10ms的端到端延迟。
Processing at block granularity and blockchains seem inseparable. The original role of blocks is to amortize the cost of cryptography (e.g., solving proof-of-work) and to make data transfers more efficient in a geo-distributed setting. While blocks are a simple and powerful tool for amortizing these costs, today in permissioned distributed ledgers, that are often neither geo-distributed, nor require proof-of-work, the benefits of operating on blocks are overshadowed by the large latencies they introduce. Our proposal is to switch the distributed ledger processing paradigm from block processing to stream transaction processing and rely on batching (i.e., block formation) only for amortizing the cost of disk accesses for commit operations. This paradigm shift enables shaving off end-to-end latencies by more than an order of magnitude and opens up new use-cases for permissioned ledgers. We demonstrate a proof-of-concept of our idea using Hyperledger Fabric, achieving end-to-end latencies of less than 10ms while maintaining relatively high throughput, namely close to 1500 tps.