Contesting the truth - intentional forking in BFT-PoS blockchains

Abstract

Byzantine-Fault-Tolerant Proof-of-Stake Blockchains usually make strong guarantees regarding transaction and block finality, which makes them suitable technologies for consortium usage, where fluctuations in state are disturbing to business processes. Proof of Work Consensus however can not make finality guarantees as it employs the longest-chain-rule, where the longest chain dictates the current state, which can always be replaced by another longer chain. In this paper we propose a dispute mechanism for BFT-PoS Blockchains, where intentional forking is used to replace non-optimal transactions for business cases, where the blockchain is used to store only optimal solutions. Based on the longest-chain-rule of PoW algorithms validator nodes agree upon a more optimized chain via their regular consensus to make adjustments to the previously agreed upon state.