Application Scenario

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Revision as of 23:12, 20 November 2016 by VolkerStrobel (talk | contribs)
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General properties for a application scenario

    • Robots work remotely, without real-time supervision (e.g., deep sea, planetary exploration, or underground); they can only communicate in a peer-to-peer manner; there is no central trusted source of information
    • The swarm should come to consensus; no robot should be able to do something without getting automatically punished or rewarded
    • Robots should be fully autonomous (no single point of failure, no one can just press a button and stop them, no person decides if a member is included in the swarm or not)
    • The swarm should be able to add new members at any time (there is no need of authentification, any robot can join)
    • Robots possibly belong to different organizations (e.g. robot project collaboration between different countries, no country wants to face the risk that another country just stops the project)
    • The swarm members are untrusted (you don't have to know to which organization or person a robot belongs)
    • These settings can be used in: exploration, mapping, oil spill removal, humanitarian demining
    • Physical Proof of Work
  • Q: Robots are computationally limited devices. Therefore, they can only perform proof-of-work with limited difficulty. What happens if a much more powerful attacker performs a 51% attack?


  • Q: Why do you use physical robot and not just simulation?
    • Simulations can never capture all aspects of the real-world
    • The goal is to pave the way for real-world robot task -> physical provide a proof-of-concept


  • Q: Why don't you just use a classicial consensus algorithm?

Other existing consensus algorithms (apart from blockchain technology) are susceptible to Sybil attacks or only provide consensus to a small degree


  • Q: Why don't you use a authentification system to only include trusted members?
    • A classical authentification system can be easily compromised (e.g., once the password is revealed, the entire system breaks down)
    • The swarm is more flexible without a authentification system: everyone can join at any time