1,874 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
A Game Theoretic Analysis of Incentives in Content Production and Sharing over Peer-to-Peer Networks
User-generated content can be distributed at a low cost using peer-to-peer
(P2P) networks, but the free-rider problem hinders the utilization of P2P
networks. In order to achieve an efficient use of P2P networks, we investigate
fundamental issues on incentives in content production and sharing using game
theory. We build a basic model to analyze non-cooperative outcomes without an
incentive scheme and then use different game formulations derived from the
basic model to examine five incentive schemes: cooperative, payment, repeated
interaction, intervention, and enforced full sharing. The results of this paper
show that 1) cooperative peers share all produced content while non-cooperative
peers do not share at all without an incentive scheme; 2) a cooperative scheme
allows peers to consume more content than non-cooperative outcomes do; 3) a
cooperative outcome can be achieved among non-cooperative peers by introducing
an incentive scheme based on payment, repeated interaction, or intervention;
and 4) enforced full sharing has ambiguous welfare effects on peers. In
addition to describing the solutions of different formulations, we discuss
enforcement and informational requirements to implement each solution, aiming
to offer a guideline for protocol designers when designing incentive schemes
for P2P networks.Comment: 31 pages, 3 figures, 1 tabl
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