Towards Possibilities of Energy Minimization in Consensus and Mining Paradigm

Abstract

Energy consumption of consensus mechanisms used in permissionless distributed ledger, such as Bitcoin and Ethereum, has become a popular research topic. Computation and storage operations combined with proof of work (PoW) to prevent attacks requires a lot of energy consumption. Due to the permissionless nature of blockchain, it is difficult to measure the energy consumed by each node. Therefore, estimation methods provide approximations such as lower and upper bounds on energy consumption. A recent work in this direction has shown that PoW is the most energy consuming consensus. In this context, there is a timely requirement to find solutions to optimize the energy consumption. Our proposal aims at building a typical consensus in distributed ledger with an asynchronous protocol to reduce wasted computations involved in the proof of work. For this purpose, we rely on a similarity search index to prevent double-spending attacks and reduce the difficulty mining involved in the PoW, by exploring how it influences the number of required iterations needed to solve the PoW.