OverChain: Building a robust overlay with a blockchain

Blockchains use peer-to-peer networks for disseminating information among peers, but these networks currently do not have any provable guarantees for desirable properties such as Byzantine fault tolerance, good connectivity and small diameter. This is not just a theoretical problem, as recent works have exploited unsafe peer connection policies and weak network synchronization to mount partitioning attacks on Bitcoin. Cryptocurrency blockchains are safety critical systems, so we need principled ...