Towards a Simple and Practical Blockchain Consensus Protocol

Since the introduction of Bitcoin, many blockchain consensus protocols have been developed. Most of these protocols are complex, making them difficult to fully understand and implement, often leading to correctness issues and bugs during implementation. Streamlet addresses this issue by presenting a simple blockchain consensus protocol that is easy to understand and implement. However, some of its design choices hinder the protocol's efficiency and scalability, leaving room for improvement. Specifically, Streamlet lacks responsiveness, requires six communication steps to finalize a block in the best-case scenario, and has a message complexity of <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$O(n^{3})$</tex>. To address these limitations, we present Min <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$\text{STREAMLET}+$</tex>, a novel protocol that enhances Streamlet's performance. Minstreamlet+ is responsive and reduces the message complexity to <tex xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">$O(n^{2})$</tex>. Additionally, it integrates a local trusted service to improve resilience and reduce block finalization latency.