Lessons learnt from NIST SHA-3 competition for scaling Bitcoin

Abstract

Scalability of the Bitcoin protocol is a fundamental issue for long-term usage of Bitcoin as foundations of financial and other applications. Thus, the study on building long-lived technical foundations of Bitcoin and blockchain technology is needed now. This situation is quite similar as we faced on the standard cryptographic hash functions in 2004. After the compromise of MD5 and SHA-0 was reported at the rump session of CRYPTO 2004 conference, cryptographic re- search community continued to work on establishing the new standard hash function. NIST organized several activities such as specifying the application of hash function, setting technical requirements as a long-lived technology, discussing the evaluation criteria and managing actual competition with helps by many cryptographers from around the world. The process and discussions in the whole selection pro- cess of SHA-3 were a best practice for the study of making scalable Bitcoin technology. The presenter was involved in the SHA-3 competition by proposing security and efficiency requirements from analysis of applications of cryptographic hash functions [1], a common hard- ware evaluation platform by FPGA board and evaluation results of 14 second round candidates [2]. This presentation shows the process and discussions in the SHA-3 competition as a best practice of making a long-lived and trustable technology, and mapping the lessons to the scalability issues in Bitcoin and blockchain. This presentation is usable in considering the process to figure out future technologies of Bitcoin.