On Cancellation of Transactions in Bitcoin-like Blockchains

Sur l'annulation des transactions dans des chaînes de type Bitcoin

Önder Gürcan (1) , Alejandro Ranchal Pedrosa (1, 2) , Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni (1)

1 DILS - Département Ingénierie Logiciels et Systèmes
2 NPA - Networks and Performance Analysis

Bitcoin-like blockchains do not envisage any specific mechanism to avoid unfairness for the users. Hence, unfair situations, like impossibility of cancellation of transactions explicitly or having uncon-firmed transactions, reduce the satisfaction of users dramatically, and, as a result, they may leave the system entirely. Such a consequence would impact significantly the security and the sustainability of the blockchain. Based on this observation, in this paper, we focus on explicit cancellation of transactions to improve the fairness for users. We propose a novel scheme with which it is possible to cancel a transaction, whether it is confirmed in a block or not, under certain conditions. We show that the proposed scheme is superior to the existing workarounds and is imple-mentable for Bitcoin-like blockchains.

Domains: Computer Science [cs]; Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing [cs.DC]; Artificial Intelligence [cs.AI]

Önder Gürcan, Alejandro Ranchal Pedrosa, Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni. On Cancellation of Transactions in Bitcoin-like Blockchains. 26th International Conference on COOPERATIVE INFORMATION SYSTEMS, Oct 2018, La Valette, Malta. ⟨cea-01867357⟩