Democratising blockchain: A minimal agency consensus model
This addresses the issue of centralization and fairness in blockchain systems for users and miners, though it appears incremental as it builds on existing DAG and chain methods.
The paper tackles the problem of monopolistic power and collusion in blockchain consensus by proposing a hybrid DAG and chain protocol, resulting in minimized leader dominance and reduced transaction censoring risk, with preliminary benchmarks provided.
We propose a novel consensus protocol based on a hybrid approach, that combines a directed acyclic graph (DAG) and a classical chain of blocks. This architecture allows us to enforce collective block construction, minimising the monopolistic power of the round-leader. In this way, we decrease the possibility for collusion among senders and miners, as well as miners themselves, allowing the use of more incentive compatible and fair pricing strategies. We investigate these possibilities alongside the ability to use the DAG structure to minimise the risk of transaction censoring. We conclude by providing preliminary benchmarks of our protocol and by exploring further research directions.