Abstract
The wide range of Blockchain (BC) applications and BC’s ubiquity come from the fact that BC, as a collection of records linked to each other, is strongly resistant to alteration, protected using cryptography, and maintained autonomously. All these benefits come with a cost, which in BC is expressed by a very high use of energy needed to execute consensus protocols. Traditionally, consensus protocols based on Proof-of-Work (PoW) ensure fairness, but are not very useful. The paradigm proposed in the recent literature, known as Proof-of-Useful-Work (PoUW), assumes the completion of additional useful work for the same amount of resources (energy) used. However, the majority of the proposed PoUW approaches do not adequately consider fairness in balancing and controlling the difficulty of the work miners need to perform. A minority of the studies that do address fairness in miners’ work utilize PoW as a tool to ensure it. Therefore, a general framework to provide a structure for understanding the difficulty of useful work and how it can be used to fine-tune the complexity of miners’ effort in PoUW-based consensus protocols is proposed in this paper. The main characteristic of the proposed framework is that controlling the difficulty and fairness of miners’ work in PoUW-based consensus protocols is achieved exclusively through the useful work. The modules of the framework are discussed, and many research challenges and opportunities are articulated. The benefits of the proposed approach are illustrated taking as an example two optimization algorithms for a variant of the scheduling problem. In addition, the steps that should be taken to make this general framework applicable to any PoUW-based consensus protocols are identified.
Funder
Science Fund of Republic of Serbia
Subject
Physics and Astronomy (miscellaneous),General Mathematics,Chemistry (miscellaneous),Computer Science (miscellaneous)
Reference72 articles.
1. Ball, M., Rosen, A., Sabin, M., and Vasudevan, P.N. (2021, April 01). Proofs of Useful Work. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive. Last update 2021. Available online: https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/203.pdf.
2. Proof-of-search: Combining blockchain consensus formation with solving optimization problems;Shibata;IEEE Access,2019
3. Fitzi, M., Kiayias, A., Panagiotakos, G., and Russell, A. (2021, January 28). Ofelimos: Combinatorial Optimization via Proof-of-Useful-Work∖A Provably Secure Blockchain Protocol. IACR Cryptology ePrint Archive. Available online: https://eprint.iacr.org/2021/1379.pdf.
4. Todorović, M., Matijević, L., Ramljak, D., Davidović, T., Urošević, D., Jakšić-Krüger, T., and Jovanović, Đ. (2022). Proof-of-Useful-Work: BlockChain Mining by Solving Real-life Optimization Problems. Symmetry, 14.
5. A novel proof of useful work for a blockchain storing transportation transactions;Haouari;Inf. Process. Manag.,2022
Cited by
3 articles.
订阅此论文施引文献
订阅此论文施引文献,注册后可以免费订阅5篇论文的施引文献,订阅后可以查看论文全部施引文献
1. Cluster-Based Blockchain Systems for Multi-access Edge Computing;Frontier Computing on Industrial Applications Volume 4;2024
2. Exploring Arbitrary Real-Life Problems in Proof-of-Useful-Work: Myth Busting?;2023 Fifth International Conference on Blockchain Computing and Applications (BCCA);2023-10-24
3. A blockchain‐based framework to optimize shipping container flows in the hinterland;International Transactions in Operational Research;2023-05-23