A Preliminary Study for The Risk of Probabilistic Blockchain Protocols

Blockchain as an emergent technology is quickly gaining ground as a decentralised distributed trustless database in the form of a linked-list data structure. This paper discusses the non-deterministic nature of public blockchain consensus protocols and argues that the probabilistic validity of a new block does not provide adequate guarantees of accuracy and integrity which in the case of cryptocurrencies could result in quite substantial asset losses. The contribution this paper adds is to spark a new line of thinking in regards to the validity of data in blockchains.