Candidate: Chien-Chih Chen
Title: Game Theoretical Approaches for Strengthening Blockchain Application Security: Focusing on Fake News Prevention and Micropayments
Date: December 9, 2024
Time: 10:00 AM
Place: EIT 3141
Supervisor(s): Golab, Wojciech
Abstract:
Since the emergence of Bitcoin in 2008, blockchain technology has been widely adopted as a decentralized security solution. However, maintaining trust and ensuring security in decentralized environments remain critical challenges, as participants may lack trust and deviate from system rules, threatening stability. This research addresses these challenges by designing incentive mechanisms that promote rule adherence and system reliability.
This seminar demonstrates how game theory can be applied to design incentive mechanisms that improve trust and reliability in blockchain-based applications. For fake news prevention, a dynamic model adjusts rewards and penalties based on task difficulty to ensure individual rationality and incentive-compatible participation. Additionally, our analysis of validator behaviors in Ethereum 2.0 under the context of inactivity leak reveals an insightful result: participants remain motivated to stay online, even though no rewards are distributed during periods of inactivity leak. Furthermore, the study extends to the application layer with the design of an Ethereum 2.0 Layer 2 micropayment system. By introducing credit limits to reduce the need for immediate on-chain recording, the proposed solution improves performance while maintaining adequate security.
In summary, this work demonstrates how game theory can address trust challenges in blockchain-based applications by designing incentive-compatible mechanisms, providing novel insights into enhancing trust, with security improvements as a key benefit in scenarios such as fake news prevention and micropayments.