An Evaluation of Power Consumption Gain and Security of Flexible Green Pool Mining in Public Blockchain Systems

Abstract

This paper proposes a variant of the recently reported pool mining approach and provides a reduction in the energy that is consumed by the blockchain consensus protocol. The novelty of the proposed architecture lies in the employment of an innovative cryptographic puzzle that is based on stream ciphering. This enables flexibility in setting the difficulty parameter of the protocol, and allows for the separation of the energy and memory resources that are required for the puzzle solving. The proposed approach provides high resistance against the following malicious activities of miners in public blockchain systems: (i) the submission of fake work and fictitious computation results; and (ii) some well-known attacks that target the blockchain incentive mechanism. We experimentally evaluate the power consumption of the proposed consensus protocol and compare it with the traditional proof-of-work protocol based on hashing. The obtained results point out the gain that the proposed pool mining provides compared with the traditional types.