{"title":"On Search Friction of Route Discovery in Offchain Networks","authors":"Saar Tochner, S. Schmid","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00039","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00039","url":null,"abstract":"Offchain networks provide a promising solution to overcome the scalability challenges of cryptocurrencies. However, design tradeoffs of offchain networks are still not well-understood today. In particular, offchain networks typically rely on fees-based incentives and hence require mechanisms for the efficient discovery of \"good routes\": routes with low fees (cost efficiency) and a high success rate of the transaction routing (effectiveness). Furthermore the route discovery should be confidential (privacy), and e.g., not reveal information about who transacts with whom or about the transaction value. This paper provides an analysis of the \"search friction\" of route discovery, i.e., the costs and tradeoffs of route discovery in large-scale offchain networks in which nodes behave strategically. As a case study, we consider the Lightning network and the route discovery service provided by the trampoline nodes, evaluating the tradeoff in different scenarios also empirically. Finally, we initiate the discussion of alternative charging schemes for offchain networks.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-05-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"116913537","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"On Blockchain Metatransactions","authors":"István András Seres","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00029","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00029","url":null,"abstract":"In cryptocurrencies, transaction fees are typically exclusively paid in the native platform currency. This restriction causes a wide range of challenges, such as deteriorated user experience, mandatory rent payments by decentralized applications, and blockchain community rivalries (e.g., coinism). Ideally, in a truly permissionless blockchain, transaction fees should be payable in any other cryptocurrency via so-called metatransactions. In this paper, we formalize metatransactions, review existing ideas, and describe novel metatransaction design approaches. Under the assumption of sufficient market liquidity, we argue that meta-transactions do not lower the security of cryptocurrency platforms. However, without changing the underlying blockchain, metatransaction designs typically increase transaction costs and reduce the blockchain transaction throughput.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"18 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-04-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"126789914","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"BAFFLE : Blockchain Based Aggregator Free Federated Learning","authors":"P. Ramanan, K. Nakayama, Ratnesh K. Sharma","doi":"10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1109/Blockchain50366.2020.00017","url":null,"abstract":"A key aspect of Federated Learning (FL) is the requirement of a centralized aggregator to maintain and update the global model. However, in many cases orchestrating a centralized aggregator might be infeasible due to numerous operational constraints. In this paper, we introduce BAFFLE, an aggregator free, blockchain driven, FL environment that is inherently decentralized. BAFFLE leverages Smart Contracts (SC) to coordinate the round delineation, model aggregation and update tasks in FL. BAFFLE boosts computational performance by decomposing the global parameter space into distinct chunks followed by a score and bid strategy. In order to characterize the performance of BAFFLE, we conduct experiments on a private Ethereum network and use the centralized and aggregator driven methods as our benchmark. We show that BAFFLE significantly reduces the gas costs for FL on the blockchain as compared to a direct adaptation of the aggregator based method. Our results also show that BAFFLE achieves high scalability and computational efficiency while delivering similar accuracy as the benchmark methods.","PeriodicalId":109440,"journal":{"name":"2020 IEEE International Conference on Blockchain (Blockchain)","volume":"31 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2019-09-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"115771052","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}