TensorFIip: A Fast Fully-Decentralized Computational Lottery for Cryptocurrency Networks

Abstract

Distributed ledger technology, and specifically blockchain protocols, have been leveraged to define decentralized lotteries to circumvent challenges in traditional lottery systems. Unfortunately, lottery consensus in proof-of-resource (such as proof-of-work, proof-of-stake) blockchains is provably biased towards lottery users that command a majority of the resource determining consensus in their respective cryptocurrency networks, resulting in partial-decentralization. Further, classical consensus protocols are inherently slow in achieving consensus, and thus cannot be considered for designing fast decentralized lotteries.We present a fast, fully-decentralized computational lottery TensorFlip, where the betting users and the lottery house are peers in the same cryptocurrency network, and the bet and winning per player is a consensus based on a rudimentary quantum and classical distributed computation. We employ a two-party verifiable random function construction for computing the lottery winnings. Our lottery operates in the presence of both fail-stop and Byzantine adversaries, under the synchronous network model. Although slower classical consensus based and partially-decentralized blockchain consensus based lotteries may exist, we believe we are the first to propose a quantum and classical computation based deterministic fully-decentralized lottery, with an expected constant round complexity protocol.