On Fairness in Committee-Based Blockchains

Authors Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou, Antonella Del Pozzo, Maria Potop-Butucaru, Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni



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Author Details

Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou
  • Université Paris-Saclay, CEA, List, F-91120, Palaiseau, France
  • Sorbonne Université, CNRS, LIP6, F-75005 Paris, France
Antonella Del Pozzo
  • Université Paris-Saclay, CEA, List, F-91120, Palaiseau, France
Maria Potop-Butucaru
  • Sorbonne Université, CNRS, LIP6, F-75005 Paris, France
Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni
  • Université Paris-Saclay, CEA, List, F-91120, Palaiseau, France

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Ludovic Desmeuzes for his work on the numerical examples.

Cite AsGet BibTex

Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou, Antonella Del Pozzo, Maria Potop-Butucaru, and Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni. On Fairness in Committee-Based Blockchains. In 2nd International Conference on Blockchain Economics, Security and Protocols (Tokenomics 2020). Open Access Series in Informatics (OASIcs), Volume 82, pp. 4:1-4:15, Schloss Dagstuhl – Leibniz-Zentrum für Informatik (2021)
https://doi.org/10.4230/OASIcs.Tokenomics.2020.4

Abstract

Committee-based blockchains are among the most popular alternatives of proof-of-work based blockchains, such as Bitcoin. They provide strong consistency (no fork) under classical assumptions, and avoid using energy-consuming mechanisms to add new blocks in the blockchain. For each block, these blockchains use a committee that executes Byzantine-fault tolerant distributed consensus to decide the next block they will add in the blockchain. Unlike Bitcoin, where there is only one creator per block, in committee-based blockchain any block is cooperatively created. In order to incentivize committee members to participate in the creation of new blocks, rewarding schemes have to be designed. In this paper, we study the fairness of rewarding in committee-based blockchains and we provide necessary and sufficient conditions on the system communication under which it is possible to have a fair reward mechanism.

Subject Classification

ACM Subject Classification
  • Computer systems organization → Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks
Keywords
  • Blockchain
  • Consensus
  • Committee
  • Fairness
  • Proof-of-Stake
  • Reward
  • Selection

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