Related papers: A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Shard-Based Permissio…
In this paper we explore a context of application of Cob, a recently introduced Byzantine Fault Tolerant consensus protocol. Cob proves to be a leaderless consensus protocol which carries out the consensus process in parallel on each…
We present SmartShards: a new sharding algorithm for improving Byzantine tolerance and churn resistance in blockchains. Our algorithm places a peer in multiple shards to create an overlap. This simplifies cross-shard communication and shard…
The rise of blockchain-based cryptocurrencies has led to an explosion of services using distributed ledgers as their underlying infrastructure. However, due to inherently single-service oriented blockchain protocols, such services can bloat…
Propagation latency is inherent to any distributed network, including blockchains. Typically, blockchain protocols provide a timing buffer for block propagation across the network. In leader-based blockchains, the leader -- block proposer…
The incentive-compatibility properties of blockchain transaction fee mechanisms have been investigated with *passive* block producers that are motivated purely by the net rewards earned at the consensus layer. This paper introduces a model…
The application of incentives, such as reward and punishment, is a frequently applied way for promoting cooperation among interacting individuals in structured populations. However, how to properly use the incentives is still a challenging…
Blockchain systems often rely on rationality assumptions for their security, expecting that nodes are motivated to maximize their profits. These systems thus design their protocols to incentivize nodes to execute the honest protocol but…
Blockchain technology, with implications in the financial domain, offers data in the form of large-scale transaction networks. Analyzing transaction networks facilitates fraud detection, market analysis, and supports government regulation.…
Mining in proof-of-work blockchains has become an expensive affair requiring specialized hardware capable of executing several megahashes per second at huge electricity costs. Miners earn a reward each time they mine a block within the…
Payment channel networks (PCNs) have emerged as a scalability solution for blockchains built on the concept of a payment channel: a setting that allows two nodes to safely transact between themselves in high frequencies based on…
In this paper, we introduce a game theoretic framework for studying the problem of minimizing the delay of instantly decodable network coding (IDNC) for cooperative data exchange (CDE) in decentralized wireless network. In this…
We study the strategic implications that arise from adding one extra option to the miners participating in the bitcoin protocol. We propose that when adding a block, miners also have the ability to pay forward an amount to be collected by…
Blockchain protocols typically aspire to run in the permissionless setting, in which nodes are owned and operated by a large number of diverse and unknown entities, with each node free to start or stop running the protocol at any time. This…
Crowdsourcing websites (e.g. Yahoo! Answers, Amazon Mechanical Turk, and etc.) emerged in recent years that allow requesters from all around the world to post tasks and seek help from an equally global pool of workers. However, intrinsic…
Existing fair exchange protocols usually neglect consideration of cost when assessing their fairness. However, in an environment with non-negligible transaction cost, e.g., public blockchains, high or unexpected transaction cost might be an…
In game theory, a trusted mediator acting on behalf of the players can enable the attainment of correlated equilibria, which may provide better payoffs than those available from the Nash equilibria alone. We explore the approach of…
Censorship resilience is a fundamental assumption underlying the security of blockchain protocols. Additionally, the analysis of blockchain security from an economic and game theoretic perspective has been growing in popularity in recent…
Executing smart contracts is a compute and storage-intensive task, which currently dominates modern blockchain's performance. Given that computers are becoming increasingly multicore, concurrency is an attractive approach to improve…
Cross-chain swaps enable exchange of different assets that reside on different blockchains. Several protocols have been proposed for atomic cross-chain swaps. However, those protocols are not fault-tolerant, in the sense that if any party…
This paper aims to design a distributed coordination algorithm for solving a multi-agent decision problem with a hierarchical structure. The primary goal is to search the Nash equilibrium of a noncooperative game such that each player has…