Part of the design of many blockchains and cryptocurrencies includes a treasury, which periodically allocates collected funds to various projects that could be beneficial to their ecosystem. These projects are then voted on and selected by the users of the respective cryptocurrency. To better inform the users' choices, the proposals can be reviewed, in distributed fashion. Motivated by these intricacies, we study the problem of crowdsourcing reviews for different proposals, in parallel. During the reviewing phase, every reviewer can select the proposals to write reviews for, as well as the quality of each review. The quality levels follow certain very coarse community guidelines (since the review of the reviews has to be robust enough, even though it is also crowdsourced) and can have values such as 'excellent' or 'good'. Based on these scores and the distribution of reviews, every reviewer will receive some reward for their efforts. In this paper, we consider a simple and intuitive reward scheme and show that it always has pure Nash equilibria, under two different scenarios. In addition, we show that these equilibria guarantee constant factor approximations for two natural metrics: the total quality of all reviews, as well as the fraction of proposals that received at least one review, compared to the optimal outcome.

With respect to the procedures of test suite construction and statistical tests’ utilization, it is important to find out whether tests from a particular suite are statistically independent. A new method for verification of statistical tests’ independence presented in this paper has some advantages in comparison with previously proposed methods. It has a rigorous mathematical substantiation, and may be applied to an arbitrary suite of tests and to an arbitrary random or pseudorandom number generator. It also requires a smaller number of sequences from the generator, as compared to previously known methods. We also present results of application of this method to some test suites, such as NIST, and to another test suite proposed by authors, which consists of six simple tests (we called it “Six Tests Suite”). It is essential that the tests from NIST appear to be dependent, so that suite is redundant and may be reduced, resulting in shorter testing time interval without loss of quality. In contrast to NIST, the tests from Six Tests Suite turn out to be independent in the sense of the proposed method.