Distributed Ledger Register: From Safe to Atomic

Abstract

This paper continues the recent line of academic effort dedicated to formalizing distributed ledgers. This work is the first one to propose a specification of distributed ledger register that matches the Lamport hierarchy from safe to atomic. Moreover, we propose implementations of distributed ledger registers with safe, regular and atomic guaranties in a model of communication specific to distributed ledgers technology that we also formalize. Then, we propose an implementation of a distributed ledger register that satisfies the atomic specification and the k-consistency property that characterises the permissionless distributed blockchains such as Bitcoin and Ethereum.