Proof-of-Work (PoW) is one of the fundamental and widely-used consensus algorithms in blockchains. In PoW, nodes compete to receive the mining reward by trying to be the first to solve a puzzle. Despite its fairness and wide availability, traditional PoW incurs extreme computational and energy waste over the blockchain. This waste is considered to be one of the biggest problems in PoW-based blockchains and cryptocurrencies. In this work, we propose a new useful PoW called Proof-of-Useful-Randomness (PoUR) that mitigates the energy waste by incorporating pre-computed (disclosable) randomness into the PoW. The key idea is to inject special randomness into puzzles via algebraic commitments that can be stored and later disclosed. Unlike the traditional wasteful PoWs, our approach enables pre-computed commitments to be utilized by a vast array of public-key cryptography methods that require offline-online processing (e.g., digital signature, key exchange, zero-knowledge protocol). Moreover, our PoW preserves the desirable properties of the traditional PoW and therefore does not require a substantial alteration in the underlying protocol. We showed the security of our PoW, and then fully implemented it to validate its significant energy-saving capabilities.
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Energy-Efficient Blockchain-Enabled Multi-Robot Coordination for Information Gathering: Theory and Experiments
In this work, we propose a blockchain-based solution for securing robot-to-robot communication for a task with a high socioeconomic impact—information gathering. The objective of the robots is to gather maximal information about an unknown ambient phenomenon such as soil humidity distribution in a field. More specifically, we use the proof-of-work (PoW) consensus protocol for the robots to securely coordinate while rejecting tampered data injected by a malicious entity. As the blockchain-based PoW protocol has a large energy footprint, we next employ an algorithmically-engineered energy-efficient version of PoW. Results show that our proposed energy-efficient PoW-based protocol can reduce energy consumption by 14% while easily scaling up to 10 robots.
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- PAR ID:
- 10495667
- Publisher / Repository:
- MDPI
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Electronics
- Volume:
- 12
- Issue:
- 20
- ISSN:
- 2079-9292
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 4239
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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