Location via proxy:   [ UP ]  
[Report a bug]   [Manage cookies]                
skip to main content
10.5555/3635637.3663185acmconferencesArticle/Chapter ViewAbstractPublication PagesaamasConference Proceedingsconference-collections
extended-abstract

BAR Nash Equilibrium and Application to Blockchain Design

Published: 06 May 2024 Publication History

Abstract

This paper presents a novel solution concept, called BAR Nash Equilibrium (BARNE) and applies it to analyse the Verifier's dilemma, a fundamental problem in blockchain. Our solution concept adapts the Nash equilibrium (NE) to accommodate interactions among Byzantine, altruistic and rational agents, which became known as the BAR setting in the literature. We prove the existence of BARNE in a large class of games and introduce two natural refinements, global and local stability. Using this equilibrium and its refinements, we analyse the free-rider problem in the context of Byzantine consensus. We demonstrate that by incorporating fines and forced errors into a standard quorum-based blockchain protocol, we can effectively reestablish honest behavior as a globally stable BARNE.

References

[1]
Ittai Abraham, Lorenzo Alvisi, and Joseph Y. Halpern. 2011. Distributed Computing Meets Game Theory: Combining Insights from Two Fields. SIGACT News, Vol. 42, 2 (2011), 69--76.
[2]
Ittai Abraham, Dahlia Malkhi, Kartik Nayak, Ling Ren, and Alexander Spiegelman. 2016. Solidus: An Incentive-compatible Cryptocurrency Based on Permissionless Byzantine Consensus. CoRR, Vol. abs/1612.02916 (2016).
[3]
Amitanand S. Aiyer, Lorenzo Alvisi, Allen Clement, Mike Dahlin, Jean-Philippe Martin, and Carl Porth. 2005. BAR Fault Tolerance for Cooperative Services. In Proceedings of the Twentieth ACM Symposium on Operating Systems Principles (Brighton, United Kingdom) (SOSP '05). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 45--58. https://doi.org/10.1145/1095810.1095816
[4]
Yackolley Amoussou-Guenou, Bruno Biais, Maria Potop-Butucaru, and Sara Tucci-Piergiovanni. 2020. Rational vs Byzantine Players in Consensus-Based Blockchains. In Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Autonomous Agents and MultiAgent Systems (Auckland, New Zealand) (AAMAS '20). International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems, Richland, SC, 43--51.
[5]
Lacramioara Astefanoaei, Pierre Chambart, Antonella Del Pozzo, Edward Tate, Sara Tucci Piergiovanni, and Eugen Zalinescu. 2020. Tenderbake - Classical BFT Style Consensus for Public Blockchains. [arXiv]2001.11965 https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.11965
[6]
Michel Balinski and Rida Laraki. 2011. Majority Judgment: Measuring, Ranking, and Electing. The MIT Press, Cambridge, MA, USA. https://doi.org/10.7551/mitpress/9780262015134.001.0001
[7]
Ethan Buchman, Jae Kwon, and Zarko Milosevic. 2018. The latest gossip on BFT consensus. CoRR, Vol. abs/1807.04938, ""(2018),"".
[8]
Miguel Castro and Barbara Liskov. 1999. Practical Byzantine Fault Tolerance. In Proceedings of the Third Symposium on Operating Systems Design and Implementation (New Orleans, Louisiana, USA) (OSDI '99). USENIX Association, USA, 173--186.
[9]
Ittay Eyal and Emin Gün Sirer. 2018. Majority is Not Enough: Bitcoin Mining is Vulnerable. Commun. ACM, Vol. 61, 7 (2018), 95--102.
[10]
Edward Felten. 2019. The Cheater Checking Problem: Why the Verifier's Dilemma is Harder Than You Think. https://medium.com/offchainlabs/the-cheater-checking-problem-why-the-verifiers-dilemma-is-harder-than-you-think-9c7156505ca1 (Accessed on 10/01/2022).
[11]
Hanna Halaburda, Zhiguo He, and Jiasun Li. 2021. An Economic Model of Consensus on Distributed Ledgers. Working Paper 29515. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://doi.org/10.3386/w29515
[12]
Garrett Hardin. 1968. The tragedy of the commons. Science, Vol. 162, 3859 (1968), 1243--1248.
[13]
Harry Kalodner, Steven Goldfeder, Xiaoqi Chen, S. Matthew Weinberg, and Edward W. Felten. 2018. Arbitrum: Scalable, private smart contracts. In 27th USENIX Security Symposium (USENIX Security 18). USENIX Association, Baltimore, MD, 1353--1370. https://www.usenix.org/conference/usenixsecurity18/presentation/kalodner
[14]
Leslie Lamport, Robert Shostak, and Marshall Pease. 1982. The Byzantine Generals Problem. ACM Trans. Program. Lang. Syst., Vol. 4, 3 (1982), 382--401.
[15]
Loi Luu, Jason Teutsch, Raghav Kulkarni, and Prateek Saxena. 2015. Demystifying Incentives in the Consensus Computer. In Proceedings of the 22nd ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security (Denver, Colorado, USA) (CCS '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 706--719. https://doi.org/10.1145/2810103.2813659
[16]
Mohammad Hossein Manshaei, Murtuza Jadliwala, Anindya Maiti, and Mahdi Fooladgar. 2018. A Game-Theoretic Analysis of Shard-Based Permissionless Blockchains. IEEE Access, Vol. 6 (2018), 78100--78112.
[17]
J.F. Nash. 1951. Non-cooperative Games. Annals of Mathematics, Vol. 54, 2 (1951), 286--295.
[18]
Pontem Network. 2022. A detailed guide to blockchain speed | TPS vs. time to finality | Solana, Aptos, Fantom & Avalanche compared - which chain has sub-second finality? https://pontem.medium.com/a-detailed-guide-to-blockchain-speed-tps-vs-80c1d52402d0. (Accessed on 05/03/2023).
[19]
Michael Neuder, Daniel J. Moroz, Rithvik Rao, and David C. Parkes. 2019. Selfish Behavior in the Tezos Proof-of-Stake Protocol. CoRR, Vol. abs/1912.02954 (2019).
[20]
Michael Neuder, Daniel J. Moroz, Rithvik Rao, and David C. Parkes. 2020. Defending Against Malicious Reorgs in Tezos Proof-of-Stake. In Proceedings of the 2nd ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (New York, NY, USA) (AFT '20). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 46--58. https://doi.org/10.1145/3419614.3423265
[21]
Elinor Ostrom. 2016. Tragedy of the Commons. Palgrave Macmillan UK, London, 1--5.
[22]
Alejandro Ranchal-Pedrosa and Vincent Gramoli. 2022. TRAP: The Bait of Rational Players to Solve Byzantine Consensus. arxiv: 2105.04357 [cs.DC]
[23]
Maxime Reynouard, Rida Laraki, and Olga Gorelkina. 2024. BAR Nash Equilibrium and Application to Blockchain Design. (Jan. 2024). https://hal.science/hal-04424991 working paper or preprint.
[24]
Ayelet Sapirshtein, Yonatan Sompolinsky, and Aviv Zohar. 2017. Optimal Selfish Mining Strategies in Bitcoin. In Financial Cryptography and Data Security, Jens Grossklags and Bart Preneel (Eds.). Springer Berlin Heidelberg, Berlin, Heidelberg, 515--532.
[25]
Jason Teutsch and Christian Reitwießner. 2019. A scalable verification solution for blockchains. CoRR, Vol. abs/1908.04756, ""(2019),"".
[26]
Aviv Yaish, Gilad Stern, and Aviv Zohar. 2022. Uncle Maker: (Time)Stamping Out The Competition in Ethereum. Cryptology ePrint Archive. eprint.iacr.org/2022/1020 Retrieved January 8, 2023 from eprint.iacr.org/2022/1020
[27]
Maofan Yin, Dahlia Malkhi, Michael K. Reiter, Guy Golan Gueta, and Ittai Abraham. 2019. HotStuff: BFT Consensus with Linearity and Responsiveness. In Proceedings of the 2019 ACM Symposium on Principles of Distributed Computing (Toronto ON, Canada) (PODC '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 347--356. https://doi.org/10.1145/3293611.3331591

Recommendations

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
AAMAS '24: Proceedings of the 23rd International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems
May 2024
2898 pages
ISBN:9798400704864

Sponsors

Publisher

International Foundation for Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems

Richland, SC

Publication History

Published: 06 May 2024

Check for updates

Author Tags

  1. bar nash equilibrium (barne)
  2. bar setting
  3. blockchain
  4. global stability
  5. local stability
  6. quorum based consensus protocols
  7. verifier's dilemma

Qualifiers

  • Extended-abstract

Conference

AAMAS '24
Sponsor:

Acceptance Rates

Overall Acceptance Rate 1,155 of 5,036 submissions, 23%

Contributors

Other Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

  • 0
    Total Citations
  • 9
    Total Downloads
  • Downloads (Last 12 months)9
  • Downloads (Last 6 weeks)1
Reflects downloads up to 09 Nov 2024

Other Metrics

Citations

View Options

Get Access

Login options

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

PDF

eReader

View online with eReader.

eReader

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

Share

Share

Share this Publication link

Share on social media