Caccioli, F;
Livan, G;
Aste, T;
(2016)
Scalability and egalitarianism in peer-to-peer networks.
In:
Banking Beyond Banks and Money.
(pp. 197-212).
Springer: Cham, Switzerland.
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Abstract
Many information-technology innovations are driven, in their early stages, by an egalitarian ethos that empowers individuals through dis-intermediation. Bitcoin and peer to peer financial systems were inspired by these egalitarian ambitions. However, in bitcoin we have recently witnessed a strong centralization around a few large mining pools, which puts control of most of the system in the hands of a few. In this chapter we investigate the physical limits of distributed consensus mechanisms over networks, and discuss whether there are scalability and efficiency reasons that incentivize centralization. We compute the time to reach majority consensus in a variety of settings, comparing egalitarian networks with centralized networks, and quantifying the effect of network topology on the propagation of information.
Type: | Book chapter |
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Title: | Scalability and egalitarianism in peer-to-peer networks |
ISBN-13: | 978-3-319-42446-0 |
Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
DOI: | 10.1007/978-3-319-42448-4_11 |
Publisher version: | https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-42448-4_11 |
Language: | English |
Additional information: | This version is the author accepted manuscript. For information on re-use, please refer to the publisher's terms and conditions. |
Keywords: | Majority consensus mechanism on networks; Bitcoin network; Egalitarianism and scalability |
UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > UCL BEAMS > Faculty of Engineering Science > Dept of Computer Science |
URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1516108 |
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2. | Russian Federation | 3 |
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