Proof of Stake (PoS) protocols rely on voting mechanisms to reach consensus on the current state. If an enhanced majority of staking nodes, also called validators, agree on a proposed block, then this block is appended to the blockchain. Yet, these protocols remain vulnerable to faults caused by validators who abstain either accidentally or maliciously. To protect against such faults while retaining the PoS selection and reward allocation schemes, we study weighted voting in validator committees. We formalize the block creation process and introduce validators' voting profiles which we update by a multiplicative weights algorithm relative to validators' voting behavior and aggregate blockchain rewards. Using this framework, we leverage weighted majority voting rules that optimize collective decision making to show, both numerically and analytically, that the consensus mechanism is more robust if validators' votes are appropriately scaled. We raise potential issues and limitations of weighted voting in trustless, decentralized networks and relate our results to the design of current PoS protocols.

中文翻译：

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区块链上的加权投票：提高权益证明协议的共识

权益证明 (PoS) 协议依靠投票机制就当前状态达成共识。如果增强的大多数 Staking 节点（也称为验证器）就提议的区块达成一致，则该区块将附加到区块链中。然而，这些协议仍然容易受到由意外或恶意弃权的验证者造成的故障的影响。为了在保留 PoS 选择和奖励分配方案的同时防止此类错误，我们研究了验证者委员会中的加权投票。我们将区块创建过程正式化并引入验证者的投票配置文件，我们通过与验证者的投票行为和区块链总奖励相关的乘法权重算法更新这些配置文件。使用这个框架，我们利用优化集体决策的加权多数投票规则来显示，从数值上和分析上来说，如果验证者的投票得到适当的调整，共识机制就会更加稳健。我们提出了去信任、去中心化网络中加权投票的潜在问题和局限性，并将我们的结果与当前 PoS 协议的设计相关联。