Towards True Decentralization: A Blockchain Consensus Protocol Based on Game Theory and Randomness

One of the fundamental characteristics of blockchain technology is the consensus protocol. Most of the current consensus protocols are PoW (Proof of Work) based, or fixed-validators based. Nevertheless, PoW requires massive computational effort, which results in high energy and computing resources consumption. Alternatively, fixed-validators protocols rely on fixed, static validators responsible for validating all newly proposed blocks, which opens the door for adversaries to launch several attacks on these validators such as DDoS and eclipse attacks. In this paper, we propose a truly decentralized consensus protocol that does not require PoW and randomly employs a different set of different size of validators on each block’s proposal. Additionally, our protocol utilizes a game theoretical model to enforce the honest validators’ behavior by rewarding honest validators and penalizing dishonest ones. We have analyzed our protocol and shown that it mitigates various attacks that current protocols suffer from.

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