Ethical Challenges in Blockchain Network Measurement Research

Abstract

Public blockchains are the digital infrastructure that powers the multi-trillion-dollar economy in cryptocurrencies. Understanding the security and performance of deployed blockchain networks is critically important, especially when the open-membership nature of blockchain results in a large attack surface. However, measuring operational blockchain networks raises ethical concerns and could interfere with the businesses running atop the blockchains. This work presents a survey of the recent measurement studies on the Ethereum networks and discusses their ethical issues, practices, and solutions. The paper also identifies several open ethical challenges faced by blockchain researchers.