By Sandra Quinn

At the recent 2018 European Conference on Information Systems in Portsmouth in the UK, Horizon Globex had three papers published as part of the Blockchain Horizons workshop.

Written by Ashish Rajendra Sai, Jim Buckley and Andrew Le Gear, the first contribution was “Optimal block time for proof of work blockchains”.

This paper looked at how the Proof of Work Blockchains, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum exhibit a low Transaction Per Second (TPS) and how this impacts on the scalability of the blockchain.

Manipulating the block creation time can yield a higher TPS. A lower block creation rate results in a higher Stale Block rate that has a direct impact on the security of blockchain.

We intend on using a novel Proof of Work Classification model under a varying level of difficulty to classify an instance of blockchain with a threshold (Block-time) on the basis of its resilience to selfish mining and double-spending attacks.

Use of an ideal block creation time can help Proof of Work blockchains scale and attain a higher TPS without trading off security. The classification model can further be extended to find an optimal block-size.

To read the full paper, click here