Proof of comprehensive performance

Abstract

Proof-of-work (PoW), the most prevalent consensus layer for permissionless blockchains, requires miners to devote a huge amount of computational resources. As a consequence, some miners use application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) for PoW, which raises the bar for normal miners to join, making the blockchain network centralized. Furthermore, such machines can only do PoW but nothing else, which leads to a massive waste of resources in both hardware and electricity. It is desirable to make full use of these resources, e.g., for scientific computation. In this paper, we propose a new type of consensus layer named proof of comprehensive performance (PoCP). It considers both computation and space power by combining PoW and PoSpace in a sophistic design. As a result, one cannot gain advantage by upgrading her device in one dimension; if she is willing to upgrade her device in both dimensions, that is equal to buy multiple PCs. Therefore, miners with normal PCs have equal chance to win the mining. PoCP also provides a low confirmation latency and a high throughput to meet the requirements of daily transactions, and it reduces the energy consumption. Furthermore, miners are able to do other meaningful tasks such as scientific computation during mining.