Streamlet Blockchain Implementation in Python

Authors:

• Guilherme Sousa (fc58170)
• Gabriel Henriques (fc58182)
• Pedro Cascão (fc58232)

Grade: 18/20

Introduction

This project was developed during the Distributed Fault Tolerance course, it implements the Streamlet blockchain protocol for crash faults in Python, based on Section 5 of the paper "Benjamin Y. Chan and Elaine Shi. Diego. Streamlet: Textbook Streamlined Blockchains. Proc. of the 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT ’20). 2020. "

Technologies Used

• Python
• Sockets for networking
• JSON for data serialization
• Multithreading for concurrent operations

Requirements

• Python 3.x

Usage

To run the project, follow these steps:

1. Clone the repository.

2. Navigate to the project directory.

3. If on Windows, run the following command to start the protocol with a given seed and delta duration:

   python start_protocol.py <seed> <delta>

   This will start 5 nodes in separate terminals with the given seed, delta duration, and the default config file. It will also create a start_timestamp.txt file which contains the timestamp that all the nodes will start at.

4. If on other OS's, run the following command for each node:

   python run_node.py <node_id> <seed> <delta> <config file (JSON)> <start_timestamp file>

   If the start_timestamp.txt file does not exist, it will create one with the current time + 30 seconds.

Example

python start_protocol.py 42 2