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Register a new userDo the Rich Get Richer? Fairness Analysis for Blockchain Incentives
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Jing Tang
Publication date
2021
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely adopted incentive model in current blockchain systems, which unfortunately is energy inefficient. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is then proposed to tackle the energy issue. The rich-get-richer concern of PoS has been heavily debated in the blockchain community. The debate is centered around the argument that whether rich miners possessing more stakes will obtain higher staking rewards and further increase their potential income in the future. In this paper, we define two types of fairness, i.e., expectational fairness and robust fairness, that are useful for answering this question. In particular, expectational fairness illustrates that the expected income of a miner is proportional to her initial investment, indicating that the expected return on investment is a constant. To better capture the uncertainty of mining outcomes, robust fairness is proposed to characterize whether the return on investment concentrates to a constant with high probability as time evolves. Our analysis shows that the classical PoW mechanism can always preserve both types of fairness as long as the mining game runs for a sufficiently long time. Furthermore, we observe that current PoS blockchains implement various incentive models and discuss three representatives, namely ML-PoS, SL-PoS and C-PoS. We find that (i) ML-PoS (e.g., Qtum and Blackcoin) preserves expectational fairness but may not achieve robust fairness, (ii) SL-PoS (e.g., NXT) does not protect any type of fairness, and (iii) C-PoS (e.g., Ethereum 2.0) outperforms ML-PoS in terms of robust fairness while still maintaining expectational fairness. Finally, massive experiments on real blockchain systems and extensive numerical simulations are performed to validate our analysis.
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In our model, $n$ traders interact with each other and with a central bank; they are taxed on the money they make, some of which is dissipated away by corruption. A generic feature of our model is that the richest trader always wins by consuming all the others: another is the existence of a threshold wealth, below which all traders go bankrupt. The two-trader case is examined in detail,in the socialist and capitalist limits, which generalise easily to $n>2$. In its mean-field incarnation, our model exhibits a two-time-scale glassy dynamics, as well as an astonishing universality.When preference is given to local interactions in finite neighbourhoods,a novel feature emerges: instead of at most one overall winner in the system,finite numbers of winners emerge, each one the overlord of a particular region.The patterns formed by such winners (metastable states) are very much a consequence of initial conditions, so that the fate of the marketplace is ruled by its past history; hysteresis is thus also manifested.
The rich-get-richer mechanism (agents increase their ``wealth randomly at a rate proportional to their holdings) is often invoked to explain the Pareto power-law distribution observed in many physical situations, such as the degree distribution of growing scale free nets. We use two different analytical approaches, as well as numerical simulations, to study the case where the number of agents is fixed and finite (but large), and the rich-get-richer mechanism is invoked a fraction r of the time (the remainder of the time wealth is disbursed by a homogeneous process). At short times, we recover the Pareto law observed for an unbounded number of agents. In later times, the (moving) distribution can be scaled to reveal a phase transition with a Gaussian asymptotic form for r < 1/2 and a Pareto-like tail (on the positive side) and a novel stretched exponential decay (on the negative side) for r > 1/2.
Under preferential attachment (PA) network growth models late arrivals are at a disadvantage with regard to their final degrees. Previous extensions of PA have addressed this deficiency by either adding the notion of node fitness to PA, usually drawn from some fitness score distributions, or by using fitness alone to control attachment. Here we introduce a new dynamical approach to address late arrivals by adding a recent-degree-change bias to PA so that nodes with higher relative degree change in temporal proximity to an arriving node get an attachment probability boost. In other words, if PA describes a rich-get-richer mechanism, and fitness-based approaches describe good-get-richer mechanisms, then our model can be characterized as a hot-get-richer mechanism, where hotness is determined by the rate of degree change over some recent past. The proposed model produces much later high-ranking nodes than the PA model and, under certain parameters, produces networks with structure similar to PA networks.
We consider settings in which we wish to incentivize myopic agents (such as Airbnb landlords, who may emphasize short-term profits and property safety) to treat arriving clients fairly, in order to prevent overall discrimination against individuals or groups. We model such settings in both classical and contextual bandit models in which the myopic agents maximize rewards according to current empirical averages, but are also amenable to exogenous payments that may cause them to alter their choices. Our notion of fairness asks that more qualified individuals are never (probabilistically) preferred over less qualified ones [Joseph et al]. We investigate whether it is possible to design inexpensive {subsidy} or payment schemes for a principal to motivate myopic agents to play fairly in all or almost all rounds. When the principal has full information about the state of the myopic agents, we show it is possible to induce fair play on every round with a subsidy scheme of total cost $o(T)$ (for the classic setting with $k$ arms, $tilde{O}(sqrt{k^3T})$, and for the $d$-dimensional linear contextual setting $tilde{O}(dsqrt{k^3 T})$). If the principal has much more limited information (as might often be the case for an external regulator or watchdog), and only observes the number of rounds in which members from each of the $k$ groups were selected, but not the empirical estimates maintained by the myopic agent, the design of such a scheme becomes more complex. We show both positive and negative results in the classic and linear bandit settings by upper and lower bounding the cost of fair subsidy schemes.
The practical Byzantine fault tolerant (PBFT) consensus mechanism is one of the most basic consensus algorithms (or protocols) in blockchain technologies, thus its performance evaluation is an interesting and challenging topic due to a higher complexity of its consensus work in the peer-to-peer network. This paper describes a simple stochastic performance model of the PBFT consensus mechanism, which is refined as not only a queueing system with complicated service times but also a level-independent quasi-birth-and-death (QBD) process. From the level-independent QBD process, we apply the matrix-geometric solution to obtain a necessary and sufficient condition under which the PBFT consensus system is stable, and to be able to numerically compute the stationary probability vector of the QBD process. Thus we provide four useful performance measures of the PBFT consensus mechanism, and can numerically calculate the four performance measures. Finally, we use some numerical examples to verify the validity of our theoretical results, and show how the four performance measures are influenced by some key parameters of the PBFT consensus. By means of the theory of multi-dimensional Markov processes, we are optimistic that the methodology and results given in this paper are applicable in a wide range research of PBFT consensus mechanism and even other types of consensus mechanisms.
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