The Scalability of Trustless Trust

TL;DR

This paper examines how trustless trust in permission-less blockchains impacts scalability, analyzing a trust model for smart contracts as autonomous agents and its implications for Ethereum and future platforms.

Contribution

It introduces a trust model for smart contracts as autonomous agents and analyzes its scalability implications for Ethereum and other blockchain platforms.

Findings

Scalability is limited by the complexity of trustless interactions.

Agent decision-making under risk affects blockchain performance.

Generalized analysis applies to current and future platforms.

Abstract

Permission-less blockchains can realise trustless trust, albeit at the cost of limiting the complexity of computation tasks. To explain the implications for scalability, we have implemented a trust model for smart contracts, described as agents in an open multi-agent system. Agent intentions are not necessarily known and autonomous agents have to be able to make decisions under risk. The ramifications of these general conditions for scalability are analysed for Ethereum and then generalised to other current and future platforms.