Habibullah Yajam; Mohammad Ali Akhaee
Abstract
The future of the IoT requires new methods of payment that can handle millions of transactions per second. IOTA cryptocurrency aims at providing such a solution. It uses a consensus algorithm based on directed acyclic graphs (DAG) that is called Tangle. A tip selection algorithm (TSA) is a part of Tangle ...
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The future of the IoT requires new methods of payment that can handle millions of transactions per second. IOTA cryptocurrency aims at providing such a solution. It uses a consensus algorithm based on directed acyclic graphs (DAG) that is called Tangle. A tip selection algorithm (TSA) is a part of Tangle that determine which unconfirmed blocks (tips) should be confirmed by new blocks. There is always a chance that a small number of valid blocks never get confirmed and become stale. If a significant part of blocks become stale, the Tangle is considered unstable. In this paper, we mathematically prove that a TSA is stable in all transaction rates if and only if the probability of selecting all tips is at least $1/2n$ in which $n$ is the total number of tips. Accordingly, we demonstrate that the MCMC TSA used in IOTA would not be stable in high transaction rates.