Checking laws of the blockchain with property-based testing

Abstract

Inspired by the success of Bitcoin, many clients for the Bitcoin protocol as well as for alternative blockchain protocols have been implemented. However, implementations may contain errors, and the cost of an error in the case of a cryptocurrency can be extremely high. We propose to tackle this problem with a suite of abstract property tests that check whether a blockchain system satisfies laws that most blockchain and blockchain-like systems should satisfy. To test a new blockchain system, its developers need to instantiate generators of random objects to be used by the tests. The test suite then checks the satisfaction of the laws over many random cases. We provide examples of laws in the paper.