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Self-Governing Public Decentralised Systems

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Socio-Technical Aspects in Security and Trust (STAST 2020)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNSC,volume 12812))

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Abstract

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.

We are grateful for financial support from the UK EPSRC VOLT Project, grant number EP/P031811/1. We thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to improve this manuscript.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    This section only discusses approaches that are relevant to self-governing systems. Bach et al. [1] and Natoli et al. [38] provide comprehensive surveys of beyond this.

  2. 2.

    Deterministic, automatically evaluable, ‘smart contracts’ [46] are a concept at the intersection of law and computer science. While natural language contracts require interpretation, computer language contracts are designed not to [7].

  3. 3.

    The term has been popularised by the ‘EOS.IO’ blockchain [3], where it is used to describe fundamental functionality of the core protocol that is not modifiable by individual users, as compared to user defined smart contracts.

  4. 4.

    The naming is inspired by the term ‘genesis block’, the genesis of the Bitcoin Blockchain.

  5. 5.

    This is common in real-life, for example in the 2020 branch-stacking scandal in the Victorian branch of the Australian Labor Party, which led to resignations of senior ministers in the Victorian state government [42].

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  1. Department of Informatics, King’s College London, London, UK

    Moritz Platt & Peter McBurney

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  1. Moritz Platt
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    Thomas Groß

  2. King's College London, London, UK

    Luca Viganò

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Platt, M., McBurney, P. (2021). Self-Governing Public Decentralised Systems. In: Groß, T., Viganò, L. (eds) Socio-Technical Aspects in Security and Trust. STAST 2020. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 12812. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79318-0_9

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-79318-0_9

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