Self-Governing Public Decentralised Systems: Work in Progress

TY - CHAP

T1 - Self-Governing Public Decentralised Systems

T2 - International Workshop on Socio-Technical Aspects in Security

AU - Platt, Moritz

AU - McBurney, Peter

N1 - Conference code: 10

PY - 2021/6/22

Y1 - 2021/6/22

N2 - The selection of members responsible for data replication is a challenge in decentralised record-keeping systems. In ‘permissioned’ systems, this crucial task is performed by a central authority or consortium. In ‘permissionless’ systems, however, the selection process is not trivial and comes with risks. Malicious actors, in a privileged position, can tamper with data, threatening the integrity of the system as a whole. Permissionless membership selection protocols, popularised with the dissemination of distributed ledger technology, have the objective of limiting the influence of a single entity on the wider network. They do so by approximating a participant’s legitimacy to participate in record maintenance. These approximations come with downsides, in terms of attackability, system performance, supported use-cases and resource requirements. In this paper, we propose a prototypical membership selection protocol that uses the measure of personhood as an approximation of legitimacy. Interpreting a decentralised system as a political system, we frame the membership selection problem as one of political representation. We propose a protocol that democratically attributes a personhood score to members, thus creating a self-governing public decentralised system. This work in progress lays out a roadmap for the formal evaluation of self-governing public decentralised systems and describes the anticipated challenges in their implementation. Our proposals provide a means to evolve the membership selection protocol when a closed, permissioned system evolves to an open, permissionless system, as several commercial platforms intend to do.

AB - The selection of members responsible for data replication is a challenge in decentralised record-keeping systems. In ‘permissioned’ systems, this crucial task is performed by a central authority or consortium. In ‘permissionless’ systems, however, the selection process is not trivial and comes with risks. Malicious actors, in a privileged position, can tamper with data, threatening the integrity of the system as a whole. Permissionless membership selection protocols, popularised with the dissemination of distributed ledger technology, have the objective of limiting the influence of a single entity on the wider network. They do so by approximating a participant’s legitimacy to participate in record maintenance. These approximations come with downsides, in terms of attackability, system performance, supported use-cases and resource requirements. In this paper, we propose a prototypical membership selection protocol that uses the measure of personhood as an approximation of legitimacy. Interpreting a decentralised system as a political system, we frame the membership selection problem as one of political representation. We propose a protocol that democratically attributes a personhood score to members, thus creating a self-governing public decentralised system. This work in progress lays out a roadmap for the formal evaluation of self-governing public decentralised systems and describes the anticipated challenges in their implementation. Our proposals provide a means to evolve the membership selection protocol when a closed, permissioned system evolves to an open, permissionless system, as several commercial platforms intend to do.

KW - Socio-Technical Systems

KW - Self-Governance

KW - Distributed Ledger Technology

KW - Blockchain

KW - Decentralisation

KW - Consensus

KW - Permissionless Networks

KW - Membership Selection

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85111577882&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1007/978-3-030-79318-0_9

DO - 10.1007/978-3-030-79318-0_9

M3 - Conference paper

SN - 978-3-030-79317-3

T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science

SP - 154

EP - 167

BT - Proceedings of the 10th International Workshop on Socio-Technical Aspects in Security

A2 - Groß, Thomas

A2 - Viganò, Luca

PB - Springer

Y2 - 17 September 2020 through 17 September 2020

ER -