A New Approach to Orphan Blocks in the Nakamoto Consensus Blockchain

One of the main problems in Nakamoto consensus is the creation of orphan blocks and sub-chains which reduce throughput and can lead to unfairness and network abuse. This paper proposes a new approach to change the behavior in dealing with these blocks. In the proposed method, almost all correct mined blocks at any height are made final by adding a small database to the blocks. This acts as distributed supervision to improve system security and encourage honest miner behavior. By preventing conflicting transactions from being finalized and detecting exceptional circumstances, the proposed method also preserves the important blockchain features of safety and liveness. To demonstrate the practicality of this approach, its main parameter is obtained using real network data for Bitcoin. In addition, simulation results are given for Bitcoin and other scenarios with different block sizes and block times which indicate that the proposed method improves the throughput.