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Related papers: The Economic Limits of Permissionless Consensus

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Distributed control systems require high reliability and availability guarantees despite often being deployed at the edge of network infrastructure. Edge computing resources are less secure and less reliable than centralized resources in…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2024-02-21 Roy Shadmon , Daniel Spencer , Owen Arden

There has been a growing interest in realizing the resilient consensus of the multi-agent system (MAS) under cyber-attacks, which aims to achieve the consensus of normal agents (i.e., agents without attacks) in a network, depending on the…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2023-11-13 Henglai Wei , Kunwu Zhang , Hui Zhang , Yang Shi

We consider \emph{plurality consensus} in a network of $n$ nodes. Initially, each node has one of $k$ opinions. The nodes execute a (randomized) distributed protocol to agree on the plurality opinion (the opinion initially supported by the…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2016-02-04 Petra Berenbrink , Tom Friedetzky , Peter Kling , Frederik Mallmann-Trenn , Chris Wastell

This paper extends the blockchain sustainability framework of Budish (2018) to consider proof of stake (in addition to proof of work) consensus mechanisms and permissioned (where the number of nodes are fixed) networks. It is demonstrated…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2020-12-23 Neil Gandal , Joshua S. Gans

Modern distributed systems rely on consensus protocols to build a fault-tolerant-core upon which they can build applications. Consensus protocols are correct under a specific failure model, where up to $f$ machines can fail. We argue that…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2026-02-13 Reginald Frank , Soujanya Ponnapalli , Octavio Lomeli , Neil Giridharan , Marcos K Aguilera , Natacha Crooks

In this paper, we consider a multi-agent resilient consensus problem, where some of the nodes may behave maliciously. The approach is to equip all nodes with a scheme to detect neighboring nodes when they behave in an abnormal fashion. To…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2021-01-14 Liwei Yuan , Hideaki Ishii

With the development of decentralized consensus protocols, permissionless blockchains have been envisioned as a promising enabler for the general-purpose transaction-driven, autonomous systems. However, most of the prevalent blockchain…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2018-11-19 Zhengwei Ni , Wenbo Wang , Dong In Kim , Ping Wang , Dusit Niyato

Censorship resistance with short-term inclusion guarantees is an important feature of decentralized systems, missing from many state-of-the-art and even deployed consensus protocols. In leader-based protocols the leader arbitrarily selects…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2025-08-19 Orestis Alpos , Bernardo David , Nikolas Kamarinakis , Dionysis Zindros

We consider the problem of solving consensus using deterministic algorithms in a synchronous dynamic network with unreliable, directional point-to-point links, which are under the control of a message adversary. In contrast to a large body…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2019-04-10 Kyrill Winkler , Manfred Schwarz , Ulrich Schmid

Given that Proof-of-Work (PoW) and Proof-of-Stake (PoS) are plutocratic, and other common consensus protocols are mostly permission-based, we look for a consensus protocol that will suit the needs of e-Democracy. In particular, what we need…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2020-08-03 Ouri Poupko , Nimrod Talmon

Consensus is a most fundamental task in distributed computing. This paper studies the consensus problem for a set of processes connected by a dynamic directed network, in which computation and communication is lock-step synchronous but…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2022-02-28 Ami Paz , Hugo Rincon Galeana , Stefan Schmid , Ulrich Schmid , Kyrill Winkler

This paper considers the distributed consensus problem of linear multi-agent systems subject to different matching uncertainties for both the cases without and with a leader of bounded unknown control input. Due to the existence of…

Optimization and Control · Mathematics 2013-12-31 Zhongkui Li , Zhisheng Duan , Frank Lewis

While the very first consensus protocols for the synchronous model were designed to match the worst-case lower bound, deciding in exactly t+1 rounds in all runs, it was soon realized that they could be strictly improved upon by early…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2013-11-28 Armando Castañeda , Yannai A. Gonczarowski , Yoram Moses

Secure multi-party computation (MPC) is a fundamental problem in secure distributed computing. An MPC protocol allows a set of $n$ mutually distrusting parties to carry out any joint computation of their private inputs, without disclosing…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2022-08-10 Ananya Appan , Anirudh Chandramouli , Ashish Choudhury

We describe scalable protocols for solving the secure multi-party computation (MPC) problem among a large number of parties. We consider both the synchronous and the asynchronous communication models. In the synchronous setting, our…

Data Structures and Algorithms · Computer Science 2015-09-29 Varsha Dani , Valerie King , Mahnush Movahedi , Jared Saia , Mahdi Zamani

Distributed consensus protocols reach agreement among $n$ players in the presence of $f$ adversaries; different protocols support different values of $f$. Existing works study this problem for different adversary types (captured by threat…

Computer Science and Game Theory · Computer Science 2024-05-14 Varul Srivastava , Sujit Gujar

Existing permissioned blockchain systems designate a fixed and explicit group of committee nodes to run a consensus protocol that confirms the same sequence of blocks among all nodes. Unfortunately, when such a permissioned blockchain runs…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-12-16 Xusheng Chen , Shixiong Zhao , Ji Qi , Jianyu Jiang , Haoze Song , Cheng Wang , Tsz On Li , T. -H. Hubert Chan , Fengwei Zhang , Xiapu Luo , Sen Wang , Gong Zhang , Heming Cui

It is commonly held that asynchronous consensus is much more complex, difficult, and costly than partially-synchronous algorithms, especially without using common coins. This paper challenges that conventional wisdom with que sera consensus…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-03-06 Bryan Ford , Philipp Jovanovic , Ewa Syta

This paper introduces a family of leaderless Byzantine fault tolerance protocols, built around a metastable mechanism via network subsampling. These protocols provide a strong probabilistic safety guarantee in the presence of Byzantine…

Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing · Computer Science 2020-08-25 Team Rocket , Maofan Yin , Kevin Sekniqi , Robbert van Renesse , Emin Gün Sirer

Proof-of-stake blockchains require consensus protocols that support Dynamic Availability and Reconfiguration (so-called DAR setting), where the former means that the consensus protocol should remain live even if a large number of nodes…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2025-10-07 Joachim Neu , Javier Nieto , Ling Ren