Description
Date depot: 1 janvier 1900
Titre: Governing the commons in Blockchains
Directrice de thèse:
Maria POTOP-BUTUCARU (LIP6)
Domaine scientifique: Sciences et technologies de l'information et de la communication
Thématique CNRS : Non defini
Resumé:
Blockchains are transactional systems based on crypto-currencies governed by decentralized protocols. Decentralized protocol rules govern a community of users without a centralized authority. The “common” shared resource here is a distributed immutable ledger resilient to malicious attacks. The level of resilience strictly depends on the good behavior of participants, that are recompensed by a rewarding mechanism.
In Bitcoin, for instance, nodes continuously generate and propagate blocks—collections of newly approved transactions that are added to Bitcoin’s ledger. For security reasons, block creation requires nodes to invest computational resources, but also carries a reward in the form of bitcoins that are paid to the creator. However, recent formal analyses confirm that blockchains are in an unstable equilibrium due to the complex game between those who participate to the common welfare of the system and those who take advantage of it. Existing blockchains are in fact subject to the “tragedy of the commons”, a situation within a shared-resource system where individual users acting independently according to their own self-interest behave contrary to the common good of all users by depleting or spoiling that resource through their collective action.
Doctorant.e: Amoussou-Guenou Yackolley