Issue #52
Paper of the Week:
Paper Title: Mining for Privacy: How to Bootstrap a Snarky Blockchain.
TLDR:
In the domain of distributed ledgers, non-interactive zero-knowledge proofs have many interesting applications. In particular, they have been successfully used to introduce privacy into these inherently public peer-to-peer systems.
It is a well-known fact that non-interactive zero-knowledge requires some shared randomness, or a common reference string. For many succinct systems, a stronger property is necessary: Not only is a shared random value needed, but it must adhere to a specific structure, referred to as strings (or SRS).
This work describes and analyzes, for the first time, a blockchain mechanism that produces a secure SRS with the characteristic that security is shown for the exact same conditions under which the blockchain protocol is proven to be secure.
In this way, the SRS emanates from the normal operation of the blockchain protocol itself without the need of additional security assumptions or off-chain computation and/or verification.
The proposed work relies primarily on the chain quality property of “Nakamoto-style” ledgers – distributed ledgers in which a randomized process selects which user may append a block to an already established chain.
The construction integrates reference string updates into the block creation process, but faces additional difficulties due to the fact that update calculation is a computationally heavy and, contrary to brute-force hashing, useful operation.
The paper formally proves that the proposed mechanism produces a secure reference string by providing an analysis in the universal composition framework.
It also demonstrates via experimental analysis how to concretely parameterise a proof-of-work ledger to ensure that an adversary which takes shortcuts (while honest users do not) will still fail in subverting the reference string.
Furthermore, this work introduces an incentives scheme which ensures that rational participants in the protocol, who intend to maximize their profits, will avoid low-entropy attacks.
Authors: Thomas Kerber*†, Aggelos Kiayias*†, and Markulf Kohlweiss*†,
Affiliations: * University of Edinburgh and † IOHK.
Security:
1. Paper Title: Accountability in a Permissioned Blockchain: Formal Analysis of Hyperledger Fabric.
Summary: A formal treatment of accountability for permissioned blockchains and distributed ledgers.
Authors: Ralf Kuesters*, Daniel Rausch*, and Mike Simon*,
Affiliations: * University of Stuttgart.
Privacy:
1. Paper Title: Utilizing Public Blockchains for the Sybil-Resistant Bootstrapping of Distributed Anonymity Services.
Summary: This work proposes to outsource privacy-enhancing tasks to small networks of peers selected randomly in a secure, unbiased, and transparent fashion from a Sybil-resistant peer repository.
Authors: Roman Matzutt*, Jan Pennekamp*, Erik Buchholz*, and Klaus Wehrle*,
Affiliations: * RWTH Aachen University.
Scalability:
1. Paper Title: Multichain-MWPoW: A p/2 Adversary Power Resistant Blockchain Sharding Approach to a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation Architecture.
Summary: The first blockchain sharding approach that can withstand up to 50% of adversary power without assuming the honest people create as many nodes in the system as possible.
Authors: Yibin Xu*, Yangyu Huang*, Jianhua Shao*, and George Theodorakopoulos*,
Affiliations: * Cardiff University.
Proofs:
No papers.
Consensus:
1. Paper Title: Hybrid-BFT: Optimistically Responsive Synchronous Consensus with Optimal Latency or Resilience.
Summary: Can we achieve both responsiveness and optimal synchronous latency?
Authors: Atsuki Momose*, Jason Paul Cruz†, and Yuichi Kaji*,
Affiliations: * Nagoya University and † Osaka University.
Tokenomics:
1. Paper Title: The cost of Bitcoin mining has never really increased.
Summary: Despite a ten-billion-fold increase in hashing activity and a ten-million-fold increase in total energy consumption, this work finds the mining cost relative to the volume of transactions has not increased nor decreased since 2010.
Authors: Yo-Der Song* and Tomaso Aste*
Affiliations: * University College London.
2. Paper Title: Stablecoins: Types and Applications.
Summary: The paper provides a detailed overview of the different stabilization mechanisms supported by examples of international market applications.
Authors: Galia Kondova*, Christian Bolliger*, and Erich Thammavongsa*,
Affiliations: * University of Applied Sciences and Arts Northwestern Switzerland.
3. Paper Title: Mechanism Design with Blockchain Enforcement.
Summary: This paper studies the design of self-enforcing mechanisms, using a smart contract as a commitment device.
Authors: Hitoshi Matsushima* and Shunya Noda†,
Affiliations: * University of Tokyo and † Vancouver School of Economics.
4. Paper Title: Bitcoin Governance as a Decentralized Financial Market Infrastructure.
Summary: This paper studies Bitcoin governance with a focus on its alleged shortcomings.
Authors: Hossein Nabilou*
Affiliations: * Universite du Luxembourg.
Conferences & CFPs:
August 3-6 - The 2nd IEEE International Conference on Decentralized Applications and Infrastructures (IEEE DAPPS 2020) (Oxford)
October 21-23 - The second ACM conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT’20) (New York City)
Past Conferences’ Videos:
Jobs:
RFPs:
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