Ganesh, C and Orlandi, C and Tschudi, D and Zohar, A (2022) Virtual ASICs: Generalized Proof-of-Stake Mining in Cryptocurrencies. In: 16th International Workshop on Data Privacy Management, DPM 2021, and 5th International Workshop on Cryptocurrencies and Blockchain Technology, CBT 2021 held in conjunction with ESORICS 2021, 8 October 2021, Virtual, Online, pp. 173-191.
Full text not available from this repository.Abstract
In proof-of-work based cryptocurrencies, miners invest computing power to maintain a distributed ledger. One known drawback of such a consensus protocol is its immense energy consumption. To prevent this waste of energy various consensus mechanism such as proof-of-space or proof-of-stake have been proposed. In proof-of-stake, block creators are selected based on the amounts of currency they stake instead of their expanded computing power. In this work we study Virtual ASICs–a generalization of proof-of-stake. Virtual ASICs are essentially a virtualized version of proof-of-work. Miners can buy on-chain virtual mining machines which can be powered by virtual electricity. Similar to their physical counterparts, each powered virtual ASIC has a certain chance to win the right to create the next block. In the boundary case where virtual electricity is free, the protocol corresponds to proof-of-stake using an ASIC token which is separate from the currency itself (the amount of stake equals your virtual computing power). In the other boundary case where virtual computers are free, we get a proof-of-burn equivalent. That is, a consensus mechanism in which miners ‘burn’ currency to obtain lottery tickets for the right to create the next block. From a technical point of view, we provide the following contributions: We design cryptographic protocols that allow to sell Virtual ASICs in sealed-bid auctions on-chain. We ensure that as long as a majority of the miners in the system mine honestly, bids remain both private and binding, and that miners cannot censor the bids of their competitors;In order to implement our auction protocol, we introduce a novel all-or-nothing broadcast functionality in blockchains that allows to “encrypt values to the future” and could be of independent interest.Finally, we provide a consensus protocol based on Virtual ASICs by generalizing existing protocols for proof-of-stake consensus.
| Item Type: | Conference Paper |
|---|---|
| Publication: | Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics) |
| Publisher: | Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH |
| Additional Information: | The copyright for this article belongs to the Springer Science and Business Media Deutschland GmbH. |
| Keywords: | Application specific integrated circuits; Bitcoin; Blockchain; Cryptography; Distributed ledger; Energy utilization, Computing power; Consensus protocols; Cryptographic protocols; Energy; Energy-consumption; Generalisation; Mining machines; Proof of work; Virtual computing; Virtual electricities, Miners |
| Department/Centre: | Division of Electrical Sciences > Computer Science & Automation |
| Date Deposited: | 08 Jul 2022 09:37 |
| Last Modified: | 08 Jul 2022 09:37 |
| URI: | https://eprints.iisc.ac.in/id/eprint/74322 |
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