arXiv
arXiv Year 2018 Peer-reviewed
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Computer Science · Research

A Puff of Steem

Aggelos Kiayias Benjamin Livshits Andres Monteoliva Mosteiro Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos
2018
Publication year
arXiv
Venue
Preprint
Type
§ Abstract

Problem

Decentralized content curation is the process through which uploaded posts are ranked and filtered based exclusively on users’ feedback. Platforms such as the blockchain-based Steemit1 employ this type of curation while providing monetary incentives to promote the visibility of high quality posts according to the perception of the participants.

Approach

Despite the wide adoption of the platform very little is known regarding its performance and resilience characteristics. In this work, we provide a formal model for decentralized content curation that identifies salient complexity and game-theoretic measures of performance and resilience to selfish participants.

Results

Armed with our model, we provide a first analysis of Steemit identifying the conditions under which the system can be expected to correctly converge to curation while we demonstrate its susceptibility to selfish participant behaviour. We validate our theoretical results with system simulations in various scenarios.

Cite this paper — BibTeX 
@TechReport{kiayias18steem,
  title = "A Puff of {Steem}: Security Analysis of Decentralized Content Curation",
  author = "Aggelos Kiayias and Benjamin Livshits and Andres Monteoliva Mosteiro and Orfeas Stefanos Thyfronitis Litos",
  year = "2018",
  month = sep,
  institution = "arXiv",
  number = "arXiv:2412873",
}
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