Proofs of proofs of work with sublinear complexity

Abstract

In the setting of blockchain based transaction ledgers we study the problem of “simplified payment verification” (SPV) which refers to the setting of a transaction verifier that wishes to examine the last k blocks of the blockchain (e.g., for the purpose of verification of a certain transaction) using as only advice the genesis block (or some “checkpoint” block that is known to it). The straightforward solution to this task requires the delivery of the blockchain, the verification of the proof of work it contains, and subsequently the examination of the last k blocks. It follows that the communication required to complete this task is linear in the length of the chain. At first thought the above seems the best one can hope: a sublinear in the length of the chain solution to the problem will be susceptible to an attacker that, using precomputation, can fool the verifier. Contrary to this intuition, we show that with a suitable modification to the current Bitcoin blockchain protocol (that incurs a single hash expansion in each block and gives rise to the notion of an interconnected blockchain) we can produce proofs of proof of work with sublinear complexity in the length of the chain hence enabling SPV to be performed much more efficiently.