HotPoW: Finality from Proof-of-Work Quorums

We build a bridge between the notions of Byzantine and Nakamoto consensus by developing a theory of proof-of-work quorums. This theory yields stochastic uniqueness of quorums as a function of the quorum size, a security parameter. We employ the theory in HotPoW, a scalable permissionless distributed log protocol that supports finality based on the pipelined three-phase commit previously presented for HotStuff. Additionally, we present a simulation framework for distributed consensus protocols, which we use for evaluating the proposed protocol and variants with adversarial modifications. Results show that the protocol can tolerate network latency, churn, and targeted attacks on consistency and liveness at small overhead compared to deployed systems.