Trustworthiness and Pagerank on the Ethereum Blockchain: Technical Report

Abstract

Motivated by the need for a credibly neutral trust mechanism on the blockchain, we study Pagerank and other properties of two Ethereum addresses, considering one address as trustworthy and the other as problematic. We show that an unmodified Pagerank algorithm does not distinguish these cases, while asserting that Pagerank is nonetheless an important starting point for such a mechanism. We give several directions for extending or modifying the mechanism to cover such cases.