Related papers: When Friction Helps: Transaction Confirmation Impr…
In this paper, we consider contention resolution on a multiple-access communication channel. In this problem, a set of nodes arrive over time, each with a message it intends to send. In each time slot, each node may attempt to broadcast its…
Traditional public blockchain systems typically had very limited transaction throughput because of the bottleneck of the consensus protocol itself. With recent advances in consensus technology, the performance limit has been greatly lifted,…
Designing seamless, frictionless user experiences has long been a dominant trend in both applied behavioral science and artificial intelligence (AI), in which the goal of making desirable actions easy and efficient informs efforts to…
Although blockchain, the supporting technology of various cryptocurrencies, has offered a potentially effective framework for numerous decentralized trust management systems, its performance is still sub-optimal in real-world networks. With…
We define a practical method to quantify the trade-off between security and operational friction in modern identity-centric programs. We introduce the Security Friction Quotient (SFQ), a bounded composite index that combines a residual-risk…
Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the current state. If an enhanced majority of staking nodes, also called validators, agree on a proposed block, then this block is appended to the blockchain.…
Autonomous tool-using agents in networked environments must decide which information source to query and when to stop querying and act. Without principled bounds on information-acquisition costs, unconstrained agents exhibit systematic…
The Internet of Things (IoT) is transforming our physical world into a complex and dynamic system of connected devices on an unprecedented scale. Connecting everyday physical objects is creating new business models, improving processes and…
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
Similar to other transaction processing frameworks, blockchain systems need to be dynamically reconfigured to adapt to varying workloads and changes in network conditions. However, achieving optimal reconfiguration is particularly…
Blockchain systems run consensus rules as code to agree on the state of the distributed ledger and secure the network. Changing these rules can be risky and challenging. In addition, it can often be controversial and take much effort to…
Miners in a blockchain system are suffering from ever-increasing storage costs, which in general have not been properly compensated by the users' transaction fees. This reduces the incentives for the miners' participation and may jeopardize…
Users often make security- and privacy-relevant decisions without a clear understanding of the rules that govern safe behavior. We introduce pedagogical friction, a design approach that inserts brief, instructional interactions at the…
With rapid development of blockchain technology as well as integration of various application areas, performance evaluation, performance optimization, and dynamic decision in blockchain systems are playing an increasingly important role in…
The Bitcoin system only provides eventual consistency. For everyday life, the time to confirm a Bitcoin transaction is prohibitively slow. In this paper we propose a new system, built on the Bitcoin blockchain, which enables strong…
Modern blockchains increasingly rely on parallel execution to improve throughput. We show several industry and academic transaction fee mechanisms (TFMs) struggle to simultaneously account for execution parallelism while remaining…
Blockchain has proven to be an emerging technology in the digital world, changing the way everyone thinks about data security and bringing efficiency to several industries. It has already been applied to a wide range of applications, from…
In blockchain systems, the design of transaction fee mechanisms is essential for stability and satisfaction for both miners and users. A recent work has proven the impossibility of collusion-proof mechanisms that achieve both non-zero miner…
Smart contracts, the cornerstone of blockchain technology, enable secure, automated distributed execution. Given their role in handling large transaction volumes across clients, miners, and validators, exploring concurrency is critical.…
Blockchain systems and smart contracts provide ways to securely implement multi-party transactions without the use of trusted intermediaries, which currently underpin many commercial transactions. However, they do so by transferring trust…