Tuning PoW with Hybrid Expenditure

Itay Tsabary, A. Spiegelman, Ittay Eyal
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引用次数: 2

Abstract

Proof of Work (PoW) is a Sybil-deterrence security mechanism. It introduces an external cost to a system by requiring computational effort to perform actions. However, since its inception, a central challenge was to tune this cost. Initial designs for deterring spam email and DoS attacks applied overhead equally to honest participants and attackers. Requiring too little effort did not deter attacks, whereas too much encumbered honest participation. This might be the reason it was never widely adopted. Nakamoto overcame this trade-off in Bitcoin by distinguishing desired from malicious behavior and introducing internal rewards for the former. This solution gained popularity in securing cryptocurrencies and using the virtual internally-minted tokens for rewards. However, in existing blockchain protocols the internal rewards fund (almost) the same value of external expenses. Thus, as the token value soars, so does the PoW expenditure. Bitcoin PoW, for example, already expends as much electricity as Colombia or Switzerland. This amount of resource-guzzling is unsustainable and hinders even wider adoption of these systems. In this work we present Hybrid Expenditure Blockchain (HEB), a novel PoW mechanism. HEB is a generalization of Nakamoto's protocol that enables tuning the external expenditure by introducing a complementary internal-expenditure mechanism. Thus, for the first time, HEB decouples external expenditure from the reward value. We show a practical parameter choice by which HEB requires significantly less external consumption compare to Nakamoto's protocol, its resilience against rational attackers is similar, and it retains the decentralized and permissionless nature of the system. Taking the Bitcoin ecosystem as an example, HEB cuts the electricity consumption by half.
混合支出调整PoW
工作量证明(PoW)是一种Sybil-deterrence安全机制。它通过需要计算工作来执行操作,从而给系统引入了外部成本。然而,从一开始,一个主要的挑战就是调整这个成本。阻止垃圾邮件和DoS攻击的初始设计对诚实的参与者和攻击者同样适用。要求太少的努力并不能阻止攻击,而太多的努力则阻碍了诚实的参与。这可能是它从未被广泛采用的原因。中本聪通过区分期望行为和恶意行为,并为前者引入内部奖励,克服了比特币的这种权衡。这种解决方案在保护加密货币和使用虚拟内部铸造的代币进行奖励方面受到欢迎。然而,在现有的区块链协议中,内部奖励基金(几乎)与外部费用的价值相同。因此,随着代币价值的飙升,PoW支出也会飙升。例如,比特币PoW的用电量已经相当于哥伦比亚或瑞士的用电量。如此大量的资源消耗是不可持续的,并且阻碍了这些系统的更广泛采用。在这项工作中,我们提出了混合支出区块链(HEB),一种新的PoW机制。HEB是中本聪协议的概括,通过引入互补的内部支出机制来调整外部支出。因此,HEB首次将外部支出与奖励价值分离开来。我们展示了一个实用的参数选择,与中本聪的协议相比,HEB需要的外部消耗要少得多,它对理性攻击者的弹性是相似的,并且它保留了系统的去中心化和无需许可的性质。以比特币生态系统为例,HEB将电力消耗减少了一半。
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