Impacts of Trust Measurements on the Reputation-Based Mining Paradigm

Trust and reputation play an essential role in the success of the reputation-based mining paradigm, and therefore, it is important to have a mechanism for monitoring, analyzing, and labeling participants' behavior as a measurement of trust. To improve the existing reputation-based mining paradigm, we designed and implemented a trust model that takes into account real-world trust forming habits and incentivizes participants to commit to honest mining strategies in the cryptocurrency system. While detection of dishonest mining strategies can be challenging, this trust model considers past behavior and it is defection sensitive, i.e., making it more difficult to attain a high reputation value, the more one commits to dishonest mining. We also observed that the success of this trust model relies on the performance of attacks' detection, which is a reasonable observation. Our trust model can be used in cryptocurrency simulations to promote cooperation among miners and create a trustworthy environment for all participants.