Overview
Abstract
Since its genesis [1], Bitcoin had a rapid growth in terms of participation, number of transactions and market value. This success is due to innovative use of existing technologies for building a trusted ledger called blockchain. A blockchain system allows its participants (agents) to collectively build a distributed economic, social and technical system where anyone can join (or leave) and perform transactions in-between without needing to trust each other, having a trusted third party and having a global view of the system. It does so by maintaining a public, immutable and ordered log of transactions, which provides an auditable trusted ledger accessible by anyone. It has been recently shown that agent-based modelling and simulation allows to recreate the dynamics of systems at an agent level, so that the impact of actions executed by an algorithm under different scenarios can be tested and analysed in granular detail [2].
Objectives
The objectives of this course is four-fold:
- to acquire a basic knowledge on agent-based modeling and blockchain systems;
- to perform bibliographic studies on the state of the art research activity on simulating blockchain systems; and
- to build and implement simulation experiments,
- to analyze the simulation results.
Course Sequencing
The course consists of 5 sessions, each around 4 hours of lectures that:
- highlight agent-based modelling and blockchain systems,
- state the actual work on simulating blockchain systems using agents,
- build simulation scenarios using an agent-based simulator,
- experiment the scenarios and evaluate the obtained results.
Score Evaluation
The report and the defence of the achieved work will be graded. The work has to be done in groups of 2 or 3 students.
Prerequisites
Basic notions in at least two of the followings: object-oriented design, multi-agent systems, simulation and blockchains systems.
References
- [1] Satoshi Nakamoto. Bitcoin: A peer-to-peer electronic cash system. 2008.
- [2] Önder Gürcan. On Using Agent-based Modeling and Simulation for Studying Blockchain Systems. Journées Francophones de la Modélisation et de la Simulation (JFMS 2020), 03/11/2020, Cargese, France.