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Modern cryptocurrency systems, such as Ethereum, permit complex financial transactions through scripts called smart contracts. These smart contracts are executed many, many times, always without real concurrency. First, all smart contracts are serially executed by miners before appending them to the blockchain. Later, those contracts are serially re-executed by validators to verify that the smart contracts were executed correctly by miners. Serial execution limits system throughput and fails to exploit today's concurrent multicore and cluster architectures. Nevertheless, serial execution appears to be required: contracts share state, and contract programming languages have a serial semantics.
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Dickerson et al. (2017) studied this question.
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