1,291 research outputs found
Systematizing Decentralization and Privacy: Lessons from 15 Years of Research and Deployments
Decentralized systems are a subset of distributed systems where multiple
authorities control different components and no authority is fully trusted by
all. This implies that any component in a decentralized system is potentially
adversarial. We revise fifteen years of research on decentralization and
privacy, and provide an overview of key systems, as well as key insights for
designers of future systems. We show that decentralized designs can enhance
privacy, integrity, and availability but also require careful trade-offs in
terms of system complexity, properties provided, and degree of
decentralization. These trade-offs need to be understood and navigated by
designers. We argue that a combination of insights from cryptography,
distributed systems, and mechanism design, aligned with the development of
adequate incentives, are necessary to build scalable and successful
privacy-preserving decentralized systems
Decentralization in Bitcoin and Ethereum Networks
Blockchain-based cryptocurrencies have demonstrated how to securely implement
traditionally centralized systems, such as currencies, in a decentralized
fashion. However, there have been few measurement studies on the level of
decentralization they achieve in practice. We present a measurement study on
various decentralization metrics of two of the leading cryptocurrencies with
the largest market capitalization and user base, Bitcoin and Ethereum. We
investigate the extent of decentralization by measuring the network resources
of nodes and the interconnection among them, the protocol requirements
affecting the operation of nodes, and the robustness of the two systems against
attacks. In particular, we adapted existing internet measurement techniques and
used the Falcon Relay Network as a novel measurement tool to obtain our data.
We discovered that neither Bitcoin nor Ethereum has strictly better properties
than the other. We also provide concrete suggestions for improving both
systems.Comment: Financial Cryptography and Data Security 201
- …