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title: 'Bigchain: A Scalable Blockchain Database'

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This paper describes Bigchain, a blockchain database technology capable of 100,000 transactions per second throughput and storing petabytes of data. It is suitable for deployment as trustless public blockchain databases, as well as permission-controlled blockchain databases for private trust networks.

The Bitcoin blockchain has sparked dreams of an open, global database that could transform the financial system and the broader Internet, with long-term positive implications for society. However, the Bitcoin blockchain has major scalability and governance issues. There are several proposals to scale the blockchain, from proof of stake to side chains; we discuss the challenges of these.

Bigchain is an alternative that draws on ideas from cryptography engineering, distributed databases, the domain name system (DNS), and an innovation we call blockchain pipelining. Rather than trying to scale up a blockchain, we add decentralized characteristics to an existing, scalable, battle-hardened distributed database. We present a thorough description of Bigchain, and experimental results.

> Trent McConaghy, Rodolphe Marques, Andreas Müller
> ascribe GmbH, Berlin, Germany