Committee Selection in DAG Distributed Ledgers and Applications

Abstract

In this paper, we propose several solutions to the committee selection problem among participants of a DAG distributed ledger. Our methods are based on a ledger intrinsic reputation model that serves as a selection criterion. The main difficulty arises from the fact that the DAG ledger is a priori not totally ordered and that the participants need to reach a consensus on participants’ reputation. Furthermore, we outline applications of the proposed protocols, including: (i) self-contained decentralized random number beacon; (ii) selection of oracles in smart contracts; (iii) applications in consensus protocols and sharding solutions. We conclude with a discussion on the security and liveness of the proposed protocols by modeling reputation with a Zipf law.