UCL Discovery
UCL home » Library Services » Electronic resources » UCL Discovery

Scalability and egalitarianism in peer-to-peer networks

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. Green open access

[thumbnail of Chap_11.pdf]
Preview
Text
Chap_11.pdf - Accepted Version

Download (517kB) | Preview

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
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
Downloads since deposit
Loading...
82Downloads
Download activity - last month
Loading...
Download activity - last 12 months
Loading...
Downloads by country - last 12 months
1.United States
4
2.Russian Federation
3
3.Japan
1
4.Norway
1
5.United Kingdom
1
6.Netherlands
1
7.Philippines
1
8.China
1

Archive Staff Only

View Item View Item