Design of a game to teach the principles of Nakomoto consensus

DegreeBachelor
StatusClosed
Supervisor(s)Dr. Svetlana Abramova

Description

The general idea is to design and produce prototypes of a multi-player board or card game (e.g., like Dominoes) that simulates the Nakamoto consensus which is implemented in Bitcoin. The main purpose of this game will be to educate the general public on the consensus mechanism and its properties, which are hard to grasp without gamification. This thesis requires a student’s creativity combined with a thorough understanding of the Bitcoin protocol. Design choices of the game should be discussed and justified in the thesis as well as calibrated and evaluated using systematic experimental test runs with human subjects.

References

  • Nakamoto, S. Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System. 2008. http://www.bitcoin.org/bitcoin.pdf.
  • Narayanan, A., Bonneau, J., Felten, E., Miller, A., and Goldfeder, S. Bitcoin and Cryptocurrency Technologies: A Comprehensive Introduction. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ, USA, 2016.
  • Bano, S., Sonnino, A., Al-Bassam, M., et al. SoK: Consensus in the Age of Blockchains. In 1st ACM Conference on Advances in Financial Technologies (AFT’19). Zurich, Switzerland, 2019.