On Fairness in Voting Consensus Protocols

Abstract: Voting algorithms have been widely used as consensus protocols in the realization of fault-tolerant systems. These algorithms are best suited for distributed systems of nodes with low computational power or heterogeneous networks, where different nodes may have different levels of reputation or weight. Our main contribution is the construction of a fair voting protocol in the sense that the influence of the eventual outcome of a given participant is linear in its weight. Specifically, the fairness property guarantees that any node can actively participate in the consensus finding even with low resources or weight. We investigate effects that may arise from weighted voting, such as loss of anonymity, centralization, scalability, and discuss their relevance to protocol design and implementation.