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A Distributed Ledger Technology Based on Shared Write-Once Objects

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Part of the Lecture Notes in Computer Science book series (LNCS, volume 11665)

Abstract

Research on blockchain technologies and applications has exploded since Satoshi Nakamoto’s seminal paper on Bitcoin. Everybody agrees that blockchain is a foundational technology, but neither has a unified definition of blockchain been established yet, nor does a commonly agreed upon standard exist. The basic principle of a blockchain is to maintain transactions on digital assets, without utilizing a central coordinator. Despite the assumed trustless environment, high security is promised.

The core technologies behind blockchain are well known in distributed computing. They comprise peer-to-peer replication and peer-to-peer consensus. In addition, cryptography is used to sign transactions and to achieve a timely order between them.

In this paper we show how a coordination middleware that relies on the virtual shared memory (VSM) paradigm can contribute to realizing a flexible and generally distributed ledger technology (DLT) that can serve as the basis for many different kinds of blockchain applications. As a proof-of-concept, the realization of different blockchain types, such as public and permissioned, and different consensus protocols are sketched on top of this VSM-based DLT.

Keywords

Virtual shared memory Shared objects Coordination system Distributed ledger technology Blockchain 
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© Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019

Authors and Affiliations

  1. 1.Faculty of Informatics, Compilers and Languages Group, Institute of Information Systems EngineeringTU WienWienAustria

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