On Fairness in Committee-Based Blockchains

Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou (1, 2) , Antonella Del Pozzo (2) , Maria Potop-Butucaru (1, 3) , Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni (2)

1 NPA - Networks and Performance Analysis
2 CEA - CEA- Saclay
3 LINCS - Laboratory of Information, Network and Communication Sciences

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.

Mots clés: 2012 ACM Subject Classification Computer systems organization → Dependable and fault-tolerant systems and networks phrases Blockchain Consensus Committee Fairness Proof-of-Stake Reward Selection Digital Object Identifier 10.4230/OASIcs.Tokenomics.2020.4; Blockchain; Consensus; Committee; Fairness; Proof-of-Stake; Reward

Domaines: Informatique [cs]

Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou, Antonella Del Pozzo, Maria Potop-Butucaru, Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni. On Fairness in Committee-Based Blockchains. 2th International Conference on Blockchain Economics, Security and Protocols, Tokenomics, Oct 2020, Toulouse, France. pp.4:1--4:15, ⟨10.4230/OASIcs.Tokenomics.2020.4⟩. ⟨hal-04035506v2⟩