Blockchain technology, whose most successful application is Bitcoin, enables non-repudiation and non-tamperable online transactions without the participation of a trusted central party. As a global ledger, the blockchain achieves the consistency of replica stored on each node through a consensus mechanism. A well-designed consensus mechanism, on one hand, needs to be efficient to meet the high frequency of online transactions. For example, the existing electronic payment systems can handle over 50,000 transactions per second (TPS), while Bitcoin can only handle an average of about 3TPS. On the other hand, it needs to have good security and high fault tolerance; that is, in the case when some nodes are captured by adversaries, the network can still operate normally. In this article, we establish a reputation system, called RTChain, to be integrated into the e-commerce blockchain to achieve a distributed consensus and transaction incentives. The proposed scheme has the following advantages. First, an incentive mechanism is used to influence the consensus behavior of nodes and the transaction behavior of users, which in turn influence the reputation scores of both nodes and users. That is, when a node correctly processes a transaction, it will receive the corresponding reputation value as a reward, and the reputation value will be reduced as punishment not only when the node is dishonest and violates the consensus agreement but also the transaction is not completed as required. Just like electronic transactions in the real world, the higher the reputation of the user, the more likely it is to be selected as the transaction partner. A user with a low reputation will be gradually eliminated in our system because it is difficult to complete the transaction. Second, RTChain uses a verifiable random function to generate the leader in each round, which guarantees fairness for all participants and, unlike PoW, does not consume a large amount of computing resources. Then our consensus mechanism selects the nodes with high reputation scores to reduce the number of nodes participating in the consensus, thus improving the consensus efficiency, so that RTChain’s throughput can reach 4,000TPS. Third, we built a reputation chain to implement the distributed storage and management of reputation. Finally, our consensus mechanism is secure against existing attacks, such as flash attacks, selfish mining attacks, eclipse attacks, and double spending attacks, and allows nodes that participate in the consensus to fail, as long as the reputation of the failure node does not exceed one-third of the total reputation. We build a prototype of RTChain, and the experimental results show that RTChain is promising and deployable for e-commerce blockchains.

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实时链

区块链技术，其最成功的应用是比特币，无需受信任的中央方参与即可实现不可否认和不可篡改的在线交易。区块链作为全球账本，通过共识机制实现了每个节点上存储的副本的一致性。一个设计良好的共识机制，一方面需要高效满足在线交易的高频率。例如，现有的电子支付系统每秒可以处理超过 50,000 笔交易（TPS），而比特币平均只能处理大约 3TPS。另一方面，它需要具有良好的安全性和高容错性；也就是说，在部分节点被攻击者捕获的情况下，网络仍然可以正常运行。在本文中，我们建立了一个信誉系统，称为 RTChain，融入电商区块链，实现分布式共识和交易激励。所提出的方案具有以下优点。首先，通过激励机制影响节点的共识行为和用户的交易行为，进而影响节点和用户的信誉评分。即当一个节点正确处理一笔交易时，它会收到相应的信誉值作为奖励，不仅当节点不诚实违反共识协议，而且交易没有完成时，信誉值会被降低作为惩罚按要求。就像现实世界中的电子交易一样，用户的信誉度越高，被选为交易伙伴的可能性就越大。信誉低的用户会因为难以完成交易而在我们的系统中逐渐被淘汰。其次，RTChain 使用可验证的随机函数在每一轮中生成领导者，这保证了所有参与者的公平性，并且与 PoW 不同，不会消耗大量的计算资源。然后我们的共识机制选择信誉得分高的节点，减少参与共识的节点数量，从而提高共识效率，使RTChain的吞吐量可以达到4000TPS。三是构建信誉链，实现信誉的分布式存储和管理。最后，我们的共识机制对现有的攻击是安全的，例如闪电攻击、自私挖矿攻击、日蚀攻击和双花攻击，并允许参与共识的节点失败，只要失败节点的声誉不超过总声誉的三分之一。我们构建了 RTChain 的原型，实验结果表明 RTChain 在电子商务区块链中具有前景和可部署性。