piChain: When a Blockchain Meets Paxos

Abstract

We present a new fault-tolerant distributed state machine to inherit the best features of its “parents in spirit”: Paxos, providing strong consistency, and a blockchain, providing simplicity and availability. Our proposal is simple as it does not include any heavy weight distributed failure handling protocols such as leader election. In addition, our proposal has a few other valuable features, e.g., it is responsive, it scales well, and it does not send any overhead messages.