11,624 research outputs found
A privacy-preserving, decentralized and functional Bitcoin e-voting protocol
Bitcoin, as a decentralized digital currency, has caused extensive research
interest. There are many studies based on related protocols on Bitcoin,
Bitcoin-based voting protocols also received attention in related literature.
In this paper, we propose a Bitcoin-based decentralized privacy-preserving
voting mechanism. It is assumed that there are n voters and m candidates. The
candidate who obtains t ballots can get x Bitcoins from each voter, namely nx
Bitcoins in total. We use a shuffling mechanism to protect voter's voting
privacy, at the same time, decentralized threshold signatures were used to
guarantee security and assign voting rights. The protocol can achieve
correctness, decentralization and privacy-preservings. By contrast with other
schemes, our protocol has a smaller number of transactions and can achieve a
more functional voting method.Comment: 5 pages;3 figures;Smartworld 201
The Vulnerable Nature of Decentralized Governance in DeFi
Decentralized Finance (DeFi) platforms are often governed by Decentralized
Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) which are implemented via governance protocols.
Governance tokens are distributed to users of the platform, granting them
voting rights in the platform's governance protocol. Many DeFi platforms have
already been subject to attacks resulting in the loss of millions of dollars in
user funds.
In this paper we show that governance tokens are often not used as intended
and may be harmful to the security of DeFi platforms. We show that (1) users
often do not use governance tokens to vote, (2) that voting rates are
negatively correlated to gas prices, (3) voting is very centralized.
We explore vulnerabilities in the design of DeFi platform's governance
protocols and analyze different governance attacks, focusing on the
transferable nature of voting rights via governance tokens. Following the
movement and holdings of governance tokens, we show they are often used to
perform a single action and then sold off. We present evidence of DeFi
platforms using other platforms' governance protocols to promote their own
agenda at the expense of the host platform
Understanding Blockchain Governance: Analyzing Decentralized Voting to Amend DeFi Smart Contracts
Smart contracts are contractual agreements between participants of a
blockchain, who cannot implicitly trust one another. They are software programs
that run on top of a blockchain, and we may need to change them from time to
time (e.g., to fix bugs or address new use cases). Governance protocols define
the means for amending or changing these smart contracts without any
centralized authority. They distribute instead the decision-making power to
every user of the smart contract: Users vote on accepting or rejecting every
change. The focus of this work is to evaluate whether, how, and to what extent
these protocols ensure decentralized governance, the fundamental tenet of
blockchains, in practice. This evaluation is crucial as smart contracts
continue to transform our key, traditional, centralized institutions,
particularly banking and finance.
In this work, we review and characterize decentralized governance in
practice, using Compound -- one of the widely used governance protocols -- as a
case study. We reveal a high concentration of voting power in Compound: 10
voters hold together 57.86% of the voting power. Although proposals to change
or amend the protocol (or, essentially, the application they support) receive,
on average, a substantial number of votes (i.e., 89.39%) in favor, they require
fewer than three voters to obtain 50% or more votes. We show that voting on
Compound governance proposals can be unfairly expensive for small token
holders, and also discover voting coalitions that can further marginalize these
users. We plan on publishing our scripts and data set on GitHub to support
reproducible research.Comment: We have submitted this work for publication and are currently
awaiting a decisio
A Puff of Steem: Security Analysis of Decentralized Content Curation
Decentralized content curation is the process through which uploaded posts are ranked and filtered based exclusively on users\u27 feedback. Platforms such as the blockchain-based Steemit employ this type of curation while providing monetary incentives to promote the visibility of high quality posts according to the perception of the participants. Despite the wide adoption of the platform very little is known regarding its performance and resilience characteristics. In this work, we provide a formal model for decentralized content curation that identifies salient complexity and game-theoretic measures of performance and resilience to selfish participants. Armed with our model, we provide a first analysis of Steemit identifying the conditions under which the system can be expected to correctly converge to curation while we demonstrate its susceptibility to selfish participant behaviour. We validate our theoretical results with system simulations in various scenarios
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