Abstract
Sharding technology has been recognized to be a promising solution for blockchain scalability problems in recent years. For safety guarantees in each shard, mainly to prevent the single-shard takeover attack, sharding requires an identity establishment protocol in which participants have to pay a certain amount of resources (i.e., ticket price) to get a node and participate in the network. However, state-of-the-art sharding protocols overlook a non-democratic state of the real-world where every participant has a different amount of resources, termed a non-democratic environment. This oversight raises combined problems of security and scalability due to the design of the identity establishment protocol.
In this paper, we examine the effects of the non-democracy of blockchain networks in terms of the security and scalability of blockchain sharding and suggest formulae to quantitatively analyze the trade-off between security and scalability. Moreover, we conduct a numerical analysis by capturing four real-world resource distributions from renowned permissionless cryptocurrency networks. We re-evaluate the well-known sharding protocols through this numerical analysis and present the changed fault tolerance bounds and damage to scalability. The results show that the ticket price plays a leading role in tuning the effect of non-democracy. The main contribution of this paper is the proposal of new metrics for accessing the degree of security and scalability with regard to the ticket price in the identity establishment phase. Our discussion suggests further research on a more delicate ticket price control algorithm when designing a new sharding model for blockchain.
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Acknowledgement
This research was supported in part by the MSIT (Ministry of Science and ICT), Korea, under the ITRC (Information Technology Research Center) support program (IITP-2022-2018-0-01441) supervised by the IITP (Institute for Information & Communications Technology Planning & Evaluation), the Office of Naval Research (ONR) under awards N00014-21-1-2409 and N00014-17-1-2232, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) Program Office under contract W31P4Q-20-C-0052. Any opinions, findings and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of MSIT, ITRC, IITP, ONR, DARPA, the DARPA STTR Program Office, or any other South Korea and U.S. government agency. We also gratefully acknowledge an “Endeavor” research award from the Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Sciences at UC Irvine.
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Appendices
A Amount of Resource to Participate in a Certain Number of Shards
To show this, we define additional notations in Table 5. When a participant has \(\alpha / t\) nodes, a probability that the participant has at least a node in one of the shards is the complement of the probability that all of the nodes are not in that shard.
Now, we can estimate the expected number of shards that a participant with \(\alpha / t\) nodes would take part in.
Equation (6) should be equal to the target number of shards.
Solving for \(\alpha \), we can get the amount of resource with which a participant has nodes in the target number of shards (i.e., \(\lambda S\)) on average.
B Resiliency Bound Recalculation
What we want to do is to calculate the minimum ratio of resources that is smaller than the total resiliency bound (\(\theta \)), yet can generate more number of nodes which goes over the bound under the resource quantization. By equating Eq. (3), we can derive the equation for this value and it will be the changed resiliency bounds (\(\theta ^\prime \)).
Solved for h.
Multiplied by the ratio of ticket price.
Thus, the rich adversary with the resource more than \(\theta ^\prime \) but less than \(\theta \) can still subvert the network.
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Kim, G., Franz, M., Kim, J. (2023). The Ticket Price Matters in Sharding Blockchain. In: Garcia-Alfaro, J., Navarro-Arribas, G., Dragoni, N. (eds) Data Privacy Management, Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology. DPM CBT 2022 2022. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 13619. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-25734-6_12
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