A Distributed Ledger Technology Based on Shared Write-Once Objects

摘要

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.