Analysis of Nakamoto Consensus
summary
Proves a short explicit condition for safety and liveness: honest mining beats adversary when alpha times an exponential-in-delta factor exceeds beta, with safety failure probability shrinking exponentially in commit depth K. Model uses continuous-time Poisson process mining, a message delay bound delta that the adversary can schedule within [0,delta], and counts non-tailgater and loner honest blocks to show honest useful-block rate > malicious rate. Analysis uses Chernoff bounds and Erlang timing; entire proof fits in about two and a half pages.
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chapters (9)
- 0:00Introduction
- 0:43What is Consensus
- 1:25Overview
- 2:29Proof
- 9:27Model
- 16:36Key Idea
- 19:14Useful Blocks
- 22:30Summary
- 23:47Safety
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