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E. Kühn:
"A Distributed Ledger Technology Based on Shared Write-Once Objects";
in: "Models, Languages, and Tools for Concurrent and Distributed Programming - Essays Dedicated to Rocco De Nicola on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday", LNCS 11665; Springer, 2019, (invited), ISBN: 978-3-030-21484-5, 136 - 151.

Research on blockchain technologies and applications has exploded since Satoshi Nakamoto´s seminal paper on Bitcoin. Everybody agrees that blockchain is a foundational technology, but neither has a unified definition of blockchain been established yet, nor does a com-monly agreed upon standard exist. The basic principle of a blockchain is to maintain transactions on digital assets, without utilizing a central coordinator. Despite the assumed trustless environment, high security is promised.
The core technologies behind blockchain are well known in distributed computing. They comprise peer-to-peer replication and peer-to-peer consensus. In addition, cryptography is used to sign transactions and to achieve a timely order between them.
In this paper we show how a coordination middleware that relies on the virtual shared memory (VSM) paradigm can contribute to realizing a flexible and generally distributed ledger technology (DLT) that can serve as the basis for many different kinds of blockchain applications. As a proof-of-concept, the realization of different blockchain types, such as public and permissioned, and different consensus protocols are sketched on top of this VSM-based DLT.

Virtual shared memory; Shared objects; Coordination system; Distributed ledger technology; Blockchain

http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-21485-2_9