Integration of Blockchain and Auction Models: A Survey, Some Applications, and Challenges

In recent years, blockchain has gained widespread attention as an emerging technology for decentralization, transparency, and immutability in advancing online activities over public networks. As an essential market process, auctions have been well studied and applied in many business fields due to their efficiency and contributions to fair trade. Complementary features between blockchain and auction models trigger a great potential for research and innovation. On the one hand, the decentralized nature of blockchain can provide a trustworthy, secure, and cost-effective mechanism to manage the auction process; on the other hand, auction models can be utilized to design incentive and consensus protocols in blockchain architectures. These opportunities have attracted enormous research and innovation activities in both academia and industry; however, there is a lack of an in-depth review of existing solutions and achievements. In this paper, we conduct a comprehensive state-of-the-art survey of these two research topics. We review the existing solutions for integrating blockchain and auction models, with some application-oriented taxonomies generated. Additionally, we highlight some open research challenges and future directions towards integrated blockchain-auction models

A System for Distributed Mechanisms: Design, Implementation and Applications

We describe here a structured system for distributed mechanism design appropriate for both Intranet and Internet applications. In our approach the players dynamically form a network in which they know neither their neighbours nor the size of the network and interact to jointly take decisions. The only assumption concerning the underlying communication layer is that for each pair of processes there is a path of neighbours connecting them. This allows us to deal with arbitrary network topologies. We also discuss the implementation of this system which consists of a sequence of layers. The lower layers deal with the operations that implement the basic primitives of distributed computing, namely low level communication and distributed termination, while the upper layers use these primitives to implement high level communication among players, including broadcasting and multicasting, and distributed decision making. This yields a highly flexible distributed system whose specific applications are realized as instances of its top layer. This design is implemented in Java. The system supports at various levels fault-tolerance and includes a provision for distributed policing the purpose of which is to exclude `dishonest' players. Also, it can be used for repeated creation of dynamically formed networks of players interested in a joint decision making implemented by means of a tax-based mechanism. We illustrate its flexibility by discussing a number of implemented examples.Comment: 36 pages; revised and expanded versio

When energy trading meets blockchain in electrical power system: The state of the art

With the rapid growth of renewable energy resources, energy trading has been shifting from the centralized manner to distributed manner. Blockchain, as a distributed public ledger technology, has been widely adopted in the design of new energy trading schemes. However, there are many challenging issues in blockchain-based energy trading, e.g., low efficiency, high transaction cost, and security and privacy issues. To tackle these challenges, many solutions have been proposed. In this survey, the blockchain-based energy trading in the electrical power system is thoroughly investigated. Firstly, the challenges in blockchain-based energy trading are identified and summarized. Then, the existing energy trading schemes are studied and classified into three categories based on their main focuses: energy transaction, consensus mechanism, and system optimization. Blockchain-based energy trading has been a popular research topic, new blockchain architectures, models and products are continually emerging to overcome the limitations of existing solutions, forming a virtuous circle. The internal combination of different blockchain types and the combination of blockchain with other technologies improve the blockchain-based energy trading system to better satisfy the practical requirements of modern power systems. However, there are still some problems to be solved, for example, the lack of regulatory system, environmental challenges and so on. In the future, we will strive for a better optimized structure and establish a comprehensive security assessment model for blockchain-based energy trading system.This research was funded by Beijing Natural Science Foundation (grant number 4182060).Scopu

Secure implementation

Strategy-proofness, requiring that truth-telling be a dominant strategy, is a standard concept in social choice theory. However, this concept has serious drawbacks. In particular, many strategy-proof mechanisms have multiple Nash equilibria, some of which produce the wrong outcome. A possible solution to this problem is to require double implementation in Nash equilibrium and in dominant strategies, i.e., secure implementation. We characterize securely implementable social choice functions and investigate the connections with dominant strategy implementation and robust implementation. We show that in standard quasi-linear environments with divisible private or public goods, there exist surplus-maximizing (non-dictatorial) social choice functions that can be securely implemented.Nash implementation, robust implementation, secure implementation, strategy-proofness