Scaling Blockchains: Can Committee-Based Consensus Help?
研究了区块链中基于委员会的共识机制，发现批准投票在选民数量足够时能实现渐近最优、指数级快速收敛，且比常用协议更高效稳健。
In the high-stakes race for scalability, some blockchains have turned to committee-based consensus (CBC), whereby the chain’s recordkeeping rights are entrusted to a committee of block producers elected via approval voting. Smaller committees boost speed and scalability but can compromise security when voters have limited information. In this environment, voting strategies are naturally nonlinear, and equilibria can become intractable. Despite this, we show that elections converge to optimality asymptotically (in voter numbers), exponentially quickly, and under relatively weak informational requirements. Compared to popular stake-weighted lottery and single-vote protocols used in practice, we find that CBC, when paired with approval voting, can offer meaningful efficiency and robustness gains if enough voters are engaged. This paper was accepted by Will Cong, Special Section of Management Science: Blockchains and Crypto Economics. Funding: This work was funded by The Hogeg Blockchain Research Institute. Supplemental Material: The data files and online appendix are available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mnsc.2022.03177 .