Print Email Facebook Twitter Leveraging blockchains to establish cooperation Title Leveraging blockchains to establish cooperation Author Veldhuisen, P. Contributor Pouwelse, J.A. (mentor) Faculty Electrical Engineering, Mathematics and Computer Science Department Software Technology Programme Distributed Systems group Date 2017-05-12 Abstract When people interact with each other, it is often fruitful to cooperate. Cooperation is however not always established naturally, since in many systems it is not beneficial for rational actors to cooperate without the assurance of reciprocation. In real-world scenarios authoritarian central parties or social pressure can be used to organise cooperation by giving some assurances of reciprocation. In open access systems on the Internet however, both these mechanisms fall short. There is thus a need for other mechanisms that can realise cooperation in such systems, which remains an unsolved problem today. A recent innovation that has opened up new avenues in many applications is blockchain technology. The blockchain is a new type of datastructure that can provide reliable and tamperproof storage of information in distributed environments. In this thesis we apply the principles of blockchains to the problem of realising cooperation by creating an incentive system called the Multichain. By recording historic behaviour using blockchains, we utilise the principle of the shadow of the future to incentivise cooperation. The steps towards a system that can use this idea to establish cooperation in BitTorrent networks are identified. The first step, consisting of the creation of records, is designed and implemented, taking several issues of performance and security into consideration. Furthermore it is deployed to real-world users and evaluated. The second step consists of the discovery of records by others in the network. For this purpose several algorithms are explored, showing that a focus on high reputation peers can improve the efficiency of the discovery process. Additionally a prototype version of the discovery process is implemented and tested in a distributed manner. The successful implementation and validation of these two steps show the utility of blockchains in distributed networks, and pave the way for realising behavioural change using the Multichain. To reference this document use: http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:0bd2fbdf-bdde-4c6f-8a96-c42077bb2d49 Part of collection Student theses Document type master thesis Rights (c) 2017 Veldhuisen, P. Files PDF Leveraging blockchains to ... thesis.pdf 5.87 MB Close viewer /islandora/object/uuid:0bd2fbdf-bdde-4c6f-8a96-c42077bb2d49/datastream/OBJ/view