On Fairness in Voting Consensus Protocols

TL;DR

This paper introduces a fair voting consensus protocol ensuring that each participant's influence is proportional to its weight, promoting active participation regardless of resource level, and discusses implications for distributed systems.

Contribution

The paper presents a novel fair voting protocol where influence is linear in weight, addressing issues like anonymity loss and centralization in weighted voting systems.

Findings

Influence is proportional to participant weight

Active participation is possible regardless of resource level

Discussion of scalability and centralization effects

Abstract

Voting algorithms have been widely used as consensus protocols in the realization of fault-tolerant systems. These algorithms are best suited for distributed systems of nodes with low computational power or heterogeneous networks, where different nodes may have different levels of reputation or weight. Our main contribution is the construction of a fair voting protocol in the sense that the influence of the eventual outcome of a given participant is linear in its weight. Specifically, the fairness property guarantees that any node can actively participate in the consensus finding even with low resources or weight. We investigate effects that may arise from weighted voting, such as loss of anonymity, centralization, scalability, and discuss their relevance to protocol design and implementation.