Xcel Token

A blockchain is roughly composed of four modules in terms of its hierarchy: Consensus engine Scripting and virtual execution environment Transactions, block and chain logics Peer-to-peer network Most research on associated topics has engrossed on the consensus engine (to improve transaction throughput) and the scripting language (to make blockchains more useful), leaving the properties of peer-to-peer network largely unexplored. The security properties of a blockchain actually hinges on the peer-to-peer network. Research on eclipse attack was started by Ethan Heilman, Alison Kendler, Aviv Zohar, and Sharon Goldberg in 2015. Their research illustrated the first attack against Bitcoin’s peer-to-peer network by controlling hundreds of nodes, which is modeled as an unstructured random graph in their research paper. Another interesting research paper titled “Low-Resource Eclipse Attacks on Ethereum’s Peer-to-Peer Network” demonstrated the feasibility of launching eclipse attac...

Peer-to-peer, or P2P in its abbreviated form, refers to computer networks using a distributed architecture. In P2P networks, all the computers and devices that are part of them are referred to as peers, and they share and exchange workloads. Each peer in a peer-to-peer network is equal to the other peers. There are no privileged peers, and there is no primary administrator device in the centre of the network. In a way, peer-to-peer networks are the most egalitarian networks in the computer world. Each peer is equal to the others, and each peer has the same rights and duties as the others. Peers are both clients and servers at the same time. In fact, every resource and each asset that’s available in a peer-to-peer network is shared among peers, without any central server being involved. The shared resources in a P2P network can be things such as processor usage, disk storage capacity, or network bandwidth. History of P2P (peer-to-peer) networks The precursor of peer...