Grassroots Platforms with Atomic Transactions: Social Networks, Cryptocurrencies, and Democratic Federations

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor principal: Shapiro, Ehud
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866918274418081792
author Shapiro, Ehud
author_facet Shapiro, Ehud
contents Grassroots platforms aim to offer an egalitarian alternative to global platforms. Whereas global platforms can have only a single instance, grassroots platforms can have multiple instances that emerge and operate independently of each other and of any global resource except the network, and can interoperate and coalesce into ever-larger instances once interconnected. Key grassroots platforms include grassroots social networks, grassroots cryptocurrencies, and grassroots democratic federations. Previously, grassroots platforms were defined formally and proven grassroots using unary distributed transition systems, in which each transition is carried out by a single agent. However, grassroots platforms cater for a more abstract specification using transactions carried out atomically by multiple agents, something that cannot be expressed by unary transition systems. As a result, their original specifications and proofs were unnecessarily cumbersome and opaque. We enhance the notion of a distributed transition system to include atomic transactions and revisit the notion of grassroots platforms within this new foundation; present crisp specifications of key grassroots platforms using atomic transactions: befriending and defriending for grassroots social networks, coin swaps for grassroots cryptocurrencies, and communities forming, joining, and leaving a federation for grassroots democratic federations; prove a general theorem that a platform specified by atomic transactions that are so-called interactive is grassroots; show that the atomic transactions used to specify all three platforms are interactive; and conclude that the platforms thus specified are indeed grassroots. We thus provide a crisp mathematical foundation for grassroots platforms and a solid and clear starting point from which their implementation can commence.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2502_11299
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Grassroots Platforms with Atomic Transactions: Social Networks, Cryptocurrencies, and Democratic Federations
Shapiro, Ehud
Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Networking and Internet Architecture
Social and Information Networks
Grassroots platforms aim to offer an egalitarian alternative to global platforms. Whereas global platforms can have only a single instance, grassroots platforms can have multiple instances that emerge and operate independently of each other and of any global resource except the network, and can interoperate and coalesce into ever-larger instances once interconnected. Key grassroots platforms include grassroots social networks, grassroots cryptocurrencies, and grassroots democratic federations. Previously, grassroots platforms were defined formally and proven grassroots using unary distributed transition systems, in which each transition is carried out by a single agent. However, grassroots platforms cater for a more abstract specification using transactions carried out atomically by multiple agents, something that cannot be expressed by unary transition systems. As a result, their original specifications and proofs were unnecessarily cumbersome and opaque. We enhance the notion of a distributed transition system to include atomic transactions and revisit the notion of grassroots platforms within this new foundation; present crisp specifications of key grassroots platforms using atomic transactions: befriending and defriending for grassroots social networks, coin swaps for grassroots cryptocurrencies, and communities forming, joining, and leaving a federation for grassroots democratic federations; prove a general theorem that a platform specified by atomic transactions that are so-called interactive is grassroots; show that the atomic transactions used to specify all three platforms are interactive; and conclude that the platforms thus specified are indeed grassroots. We thus provide a crisp mathematical foundation for grassroots platforms and a solid and clear starting point from which their implementation can commence.
title Grassroots Platforms with Atomic Transactions: Social Networks, Cryptocurrencies, and Democratic Federations
topic Distributed, Parallel, and Cluster Computing
Networking and Internet Architecture
Social and Information Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11299