Decentralisation is one of the promises introduced by blockchain technologies: fair and secure interaction amongst peers with no dominant positions, single points of failure or censorship. Decentralisation, however, appears difficult to be formally d
efined, possibly a continuum property of systems that can be more or less decentralised, or can tend to decentralisation in their lifetime. In this paper we focus on decentralisation in quorum-based approaches to open (permissionless) consensus as illustrated in influential protocols such as the Ripple and Stellar protocols. Drawing from game theory and computational complexity, we establish limiting results concerning the decentralisation vs. safety trade-off in Ripple and Stellar, and we propose a novel methodology to formalise and quantitatively analyse decentralisation in this type of blockchains.
Description logics are knowledge representation languages that have been designed to strike a balance between expressivity and computational tractability. Many different description logics have been developed, and numerous computational problems for
these logics have been studied for their computational complexity. However, essentially all complexity analyses of reasoning problems for description logics use the one-dimensional framework of classical complexity theory. The multi-dimensional framework of parameterized complexity theory is able to provide a much more detailed image of the complexity of reasoning problems. In this paper we argue that the framework of parameterized complexity has a lot to offer for the complexity analysis of description logic reasoning problems---when one takes a progressive and forward-looking view on parameterized complexity tools. We substantiate our argument by means of three case studies. The first case study is about the problem of concept satisfiability for the logic ALC with respect to nearly acyclic TBoxes. The second case study concerns concept satisfiability for ALC concepts parameterized by the number of occurrences of union operators and the number of occurrences of full existential quantification. The third case study offers a critical look at data complexity results from a parameterized complexity point of view. These three case studies are representative for the wide range of uses for parameterized complexity methods for description logic problems.
