Game Theoretic Storage Outsourcing in the Mobile Blockchain Mining Network

Besides the computation limitation, the requirement of storing the entire blockchain is another challenge for blockchain mining in mobile environments, and thus has hindered the development of blockchain-powered mobile applications. Storage outsourcing to a cloud service provider (CSP) is a viable solution. An individual miner can store his blockchain in the cloud and then validate transactions by querying the CSP. However, validation outsourcing to a remote CSP incurs delay and damages a miner’s winning probability in the mining competitions. To shorten such an unwanted delay, miners can also cache the unspent transaction output (UTXO) set in a nearby edge service provider (ESP) for fast transaction validations, which definitely brings extra costs. In this paper, we consider a two-layer outsourcing paradigm to solve storage shortage for mobile miners. Due to the delay-cost tradeoff when selecting service providers, we can model interactions among miners as a non-cooperative game and formulate a Nash equilibrium problem to investigate the effects of outsourcing on miners’ utilities. We also study the access probability of UTXOs with different generation times. This will guide miners on how to select unspent transaction outputs if they decide only to cache the partial UTXO set in the edge. We further extend our game by modeling multiple mining rounds as a one-shot game to see how the cache update frequency affects miners’ strategies. Numerical evaluation is conducted to show the feasibility of storage outsourcing and to validate the proposed models and theoretical results.