Related papers: Prrr: Personal Random Rewards for Blockchain Repor…
Following the publication of Bitcoin's arguably most famous attack, selfish mining, various works have introduced mechanisms to enhance blockchain systems' game theoretic resilience. Some reward mechanisms, like FruitChains, have been shown…
Smart contracts are stateful programs deployed on blockchains; they secure over a trillion dollars in transaction value per year. High-stakes smart contracts often rely on timely alerts about external events, but prior work has not analyzed…
Peer-review is a necessary and essential quality control step for scientific publications but lacks proper incentives. Indeed, the process, which is very costly in terms of time and intellectual investment, not only is not remunerated by…
We introduce and study reward sharing schemes (RSS) that promote the fair formation of {\em stake pools}\ in collaborative projects that involve a large number of stakeholders such as the maintenance of a proof-of-stake (PoS) blockchain.…
Low transaction throughput and poor scalability are significant issues in public blockchain consensus protocols such as Bitcoins. Recent research efforts in this direction have proposed shard-based consensus protocols where the key idea is…
In blockchain systems, fair transaction ordering is crucial for a trusted and regulation-compliant economic ecosystem. Unlike traditional State Machine Replication (SMR) systems, which focus solely on liveness and safety, blockchain systems…
In today's programmable blockchains, smart contracts are limited to being deterministic and non-probabilistic. This lack of randomness is a consequential limitation, given that a wide variety of real-world financial contracts, such as…
Leader-based protocols for consensus, i.e., atomic broadcast, allow some processes to unilaterally affect the final order of transactions. This has become a problem for blockchain networks and decentralized finance because it facilitates…
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…
An emerging blockchain protocol design pattern leverages the asymmetry between the computational effort in performing versus verifying tasks. For example, cryptographic validity proofs (e.g., SNARKS) require the prover to expend significant…
Randomness plays a pivotal role in modern online gaming, but disputes have arisen over the accuracy of stated winning chances, resulting in legal issues and financial setbacks for gaming companies. Fortunately, blockchain-based games offer…
Motivated by the intricacies of allocating treasury funds in blockchain settings, we study the problem of crowdsourcing reviews for many different proposals, in parallel. During the reviewing phase, every reviewer can select the proposals…
This paper presents a novel staking coopetition design aimed at incentivizing decentralization and continuous growth of economic security within a proof-of-stake system. Staking rewards follow a nonlinear mapping relative to stake size.…
We study the problem of providing blockchain applications with \emph{economically viable randomness} (EVR), namely, randomness that has significant economic consequences. Applications of EVR include blockchain-based lotteries and gambling.…
Many protocols in distributed computing rely on a source of randomness, usually called a random beacon, both for their applicability and security. This is especially true for proof-of-stake blockchain protocols in which the next miner or…
We analyze bribing attacks in Proof-of-Stake distributed ledgers from a game theoretic perspective. In bribing attacks, an adversary offers participants a reward in exchange for instructing them how to behave, with the goal of attacking the…
A proof of work (PoW) blockchain protocol distributes rewards to its participants, called miners, according to their share of the total computational power. Sufficiently large miners can perform selfish mining - deviate from the protocol to…
Crowdsourcing has emerged as a paradigm for leveraging human intelligence and activity to solve a wide range of tasks. However, strategic workers will find enticement in their self-interest to free-ride and attack in a crowdsourcing contest…
Algorand is a recent, open-source public or permissionless blockchain system that employs a novel proof-of-stake byzantine consensus protocol to efficiently scale the distributed transaction agreement problem to billions of users. In…
Peer prediction mechanisms are often adopted to elicit truthful contributions from crowd workers when no ground-truth verification is available. Recently, mechanisms of this type have been developed to incentivize effort exertion, in…