{"title":"UniCon","authors":"P. Rodrigo, J. Pouwelse, M. Vos","doi":"10.1145/3493426.3493823","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3493426.3493823","url":null,"abstract":"Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) leverage blockchain technology to certify and transfer ownership of digital assets to individuals. NFTs on the Ethereum blockchain have garnered significant attention recently, with a trading volume of over $2 billion in Q1 2021 only. At the same time, established NFT solutions have low flexibility, limited scalability, and high transaction fees. These deficiencies make them impractical to use at a larger scale to manage digital assets. We present UniCon, a universal and scalable infrastructure for digital asset management. The key idea of UniCon is to track asset ownership in a tracking blockchain while making minimal assumptions on the capabilities of this blockchain. UniCon enables the exchange of asset ownership in any digital currency, unlike current NFT platforms. We devise a system architecture and build a prototype of UniCon. We use a scalable distributed ledger that is highly suitable for the tracking of asset ownership. Our prototype enables a decentralized ecosystem to manage and trade assets.","PeriodicalId":166891,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"130640652","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":"Decentralized Collaborative Version Control","authors":"Bulat Nasrulin, J. Pouwelse","doi":"10.1145/3493426.3493824","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3493426.3493824","url":null,"abstract":"Decentralized systems offer alternatives to Big Tech. However, maintaining availability and correctness despite faults and manipulations in decentralized settings is challenging. In this paper, we introduce a collaborative model that is capable of exposing all observable lying, all cheating, and all faults, while only requiring merely unreliable message exchange. Our model is based on conflicting operations on arbitrary data, set reconciliation, and conflict resolution strategies to deal with branches. It is sufficiently general to support applications like Wikipedia, Github, and Datahub in a non-profit, collaborative, and decentralized form. Our protocol guarantees strong convergence despite any Byzantine nodes. We exhibit four conflict resolution strategies that cover the spectrum of possible use cases. A remarkable property of our model is that two honest nodes are guaranteed to converge despite an arbitrary-large number of faulty nodes.","PeriodicalId":166891,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good","volume":"34 8","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"114086260","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":"A libP2P Implementation of the Bitcoin Block Exchange Protocol","authors":"Barbara Guidi, Andrea Michienzi, L. Ricci","doi":"10.1145/3493426.3493822","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1145/3493426.3493822","url":null,"abstract":"The progressive decentralization of web services brought a need for new instruments to support the development of P2P protocols and applications. The only tools available are network or event simulators, which help the development in artificial or extremely controlled environments. They usually provide low-level support with completely unstructured networks. LibP2P is a library that tries to solve all such problems, letting the users easily deploy nodes on the Internet. It also comes with a set of functionalities, to solve the most important problems of P2P networks, such as NAT traversal, peer and content discovery and routing, and much more. In this paper, we employ LibP2P to implement min-bitcoin, a minimal version of the protocol used by the Bitcoin network to exchange the blocks. We evaluate our implementation to assess the applicability of LibP2P in a real-life blockchain scenario. The evaluation uncovers that setting up communication channels is time-consuming, but data transfers are fast. Additionally, LibP2P efficiently manages cases in which nodes are behind a NAT, under VPN, or in geographically distant places.","PeriodicalId":166891,"journal":{"name":"Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Distributed Infrastructure for Common Good","volume":"9 1 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-12-06","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"122552819","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}