Consensus on Demand

Abstract: Digital money can be implemented efficiently by avoiding consensus. However, no-consensus implementations have drawbacks, as they cannot support smart contracts, and (even more fundamentally) they cannot deal with conflicting transactions. We present a novel protocol that combines the benefits of an asynchronous, broadcast-based digital currency, with the capacity to perform consensus. This is achieved by selectively performing consensus a posteriori, i.e., only when absolutely necessary. Our on-demand consensus comes at the price of restricting the Byzantine participants to be less than a one-fifth minority in the system, which is the optimal threshold. We formally prove the correctness of our system and present an open-source implementation, which inherits many features from the Ethereum ecosystem.