Related papers: Proof-of-Work Cryptocurrencies: Does Mining Techno…
Proof of work cryptocurrencies began with the promise of a more egalitarian future with a decentralized monetary system with no powerful entities in charge. While this vision is far from realized, these cryptocurrencies are still touted to…
Bitcoin mining presents a significant economic incentive for efficient hashing and broadcast of data, both parameters stemming from the Proofs of Work used to advance the network. This incentive has led to the development of Bitcoin…
We study decentralized cryptocurrency protocols in which the participants do not deplete physical scarce resources. Such protocols commonly rely on Proof of Stake, i.e., on mechanisms that extend voting power to the stakeholders of the…
This work proposes a novel proof-of-work blockchain incentive scheme such that, barring exogenous motivations, following the protocol is guaranteed to be the optimal strategy for miners. Our blockchain takes the form of a directed acyclic…
Blockchains rely on a consensus among participants to achieve decentralization and security. However, reaching consensus in an online, digital world where identities are not tied to physical users is a challenging problem. Proof-of-work…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a fundamental underlying technology behind most major blockchain cryptocurrencies. It has been previously pointed out that quantum devices provide a computational advantage in performing PoW in the context of Bitcoin.…
A soft control of the network activity through varying reward in a proof-of-work (PoW) cryptocurrency is reported. Rewards are the necessity to incent the contributors activities (i.e., mining) in order to maintain the PoW network. Contrary…
We propose DIPS Difficulty-based Incentives for Problem Solving), a simple modification of the Bitcoin proof-of-work algorithm that rewards blockchain miners for solving optimization problems of scientific interest. The result is a…
Proof-of-Work is a consensus algorithm where miners solve cryptographic puzzles to mine blocks and obtain a reward through some Block Reward Mechanism (BRM). PoW blockchain faces the problem of centralization due to the formation of mining…
We propose a proof-of-work algorithm that rewards blockchain miners for using computational resources to solve NP-complete puzzles. The resulting blockchain will publicly store and improve solutions to problems with real world applications…
Blockchains have recently gained popularity thanks to their ability to record "digital truth". They are designed to keep persistence, security, and avoid attacks which is useful for many applications. However, they are still problematic in…
Blockchain is rapidly emerging as an important class of network application, with a unique set of trust, security and transparency properties. In a blockchain system, participants record and update the `server-side' state of an application…
Bitcoin's Proof of Work (PoW) mechanism, while central to achieving decentralized consensus, has long been criticized for excessive energy use and hardware inefficiencies \cite{devries2018bitcoin, truby2018decarbonizing}. This paper…
Bitcoin mining is a wasteful and resource-intensive process. To add a block of transactions to the blockchain, miners spend a considerable amount of energy. The Bitcoin protocol, named 'proof of work' (PoW), resembles a lottery and the…
To address the large amount of energy wasted by blockchains, we propose a decentralized consensus protocol for blockchains in which the computation can be used to search for good approximate solutions to any optimization problem. Our…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) is a popular consensus protocol used by Bitcoin since its inception. PoW has the well-known flaw of assigning all the reward to the single miner (or pool) that inserts the new block. This has the consequence of making…
Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus is traditionally analyzed under the assumption that all miners incur similar costs per unit of computational effort. In reality, costs vary due to factors such as regional electricity cost differences and…
One decade ago, Bitcoin was introduced, becoming the first cryptocurrency and establishing the concept of "blockchain" as a distributed ledger. As of today, there are many different implementations of cryptocurrencies working over a…
Mining in proof-of-work blockchains has become an expensive affair requiring specialized hardware capable of executing several megahashes per second at huge electricity costs. Miners earn a reward each time they mine a block within the…
Cryptocurrencies that are based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) often rely on special purpose hardware to perform so-called mining operations that secure the system, with miners receiving freshly minted tokens as a reward for their work. A notable…