Do the Rich Get Richer? Fairness Analysis for Blockchain Incentives
Yuming Huang, Jing Tang, Qianhao Cong, Andrew Lim and, Jianliang Xu

TL;DR
This paper analyzes fairness in blockchain incentive mechanisms, comparing PoW and various PoS models, and introduces concepts of expectational and robust fairness to evaluate how wealth distribution evolves.
Contribution
It defines expectational and robust fairness, analyzes their presence in PoW and different PoS models, and validates findings through experiments and simulations.
Findings
PoW preserves both fairness types over time
ML-PoS maintains expectational fairness but not robust fairness
C-PoS outperforms ML-PoS in robust fairness while maintaining expectational fairness
Abstract
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is the most widely adopted incentive model in current blockchain systems, which unfortunately is energy inefficient. Proof-of-Stake (PoS) is then proposed to tackle the energy issue. The rich-get-richer concern of PoS has been heavily debated in the blockchain community. The debate is centered around the argument that whether rich miners possessing more stakes will obtain higher staking rewards and further increase their potential income in the future. In this paper, we define two types of fairness, i.e., expectational fairness and robust fairness, that are useful for answering this question. In particular, expectational fairness illustrates that the expected income of a miner is proportional to her initial investment, indicating that the expected return on investment is a constant. To better capture the uncertainty of mining outcomes, robust fairness is proposed to…
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