Upcoming mining mechanisms for sustainable and exhaustion-preventive mining!
PROOF OF USEFUL WORK
Introduction:
The Blockchain technology has been appreciated for its ability to validate any transaction on the Blockchain network without centralising the process, thereby preserving data privacy while complying to the most stringent data validation mechanisms. This can be done through a process called bitcoin mining. Mining is the procedure of attaching a record of the transaction generated to the Blockchain network’s public immutable record of past transactions (visualised as a chain of blocks).
The blockchain’s main motive is to serve as a confirmation mechanism to the remaining part of the network for the transaction’s validity. The Bitcoin network nodes utilise the blockchain to differentiate valid Bitcoin transactions from fake attempts to re-spend coins that have been spent elsewhere. The working of mining is due to the Proof-of-Work mechanism, which requires a non-negligible but reasonable amount of effort for preventing fake use of computing power. Every block should have a Proof-of-Work placed within it and authenticated by other bitcoin nodes to be considered valid. To keep up the number of blocks acquired each day by miners for avoiding exhaustion, mining is curated to maintain an increasing extent of difficulty persistently. Hence, this guides the usual mining terminology being described as a “resource-intensive” process with miners “wasting” a lot of energy and computing power all over the venture.
Working:
A finer protocol has been developed to resolve this matter by training a machine learning model on the blockchain for the faster and significantly more efficient process while keeping the computational copy’s benefit. The system’s prominent working is as follows- miners can generate new coins after executing sincere ML training work. The people involved in this give out the task and complete the payment to all the miners who provide the ML model training to encourage more genuine participation. The protocol can help an interested person order, complete, and cross-check useful work in a distributed domain. This secure a faithful system in which fake and deceitful activities are curbed through suitable penalties and the legitimate donors are remunerated.
The recently proposed Proof-of-Useful work, which is another mechanism for combating the excessive energy consumption in the current mining procedure, rudimentarily consists of the following mining components :
Useful-work element: This element transforms an Input to an Output. As the name of the component proposes, this conversion should be favourable for the blockchain network’s nodes. The useful work system is assembled to process below inputs to outputs- The preceding Block header is transformed into Useful Nonce, also called uNonce, and the Useful Input (uInput) is converted into Useful Output (uOutput).
Proof-of-Work hashing component- When for the Proof-of-Work hashing part of the system the mainstream Bitcoin Ethereum mining accepts any input Nonce at random, the model of Proof-of-Useful-Work only allows for authorised uNonces as inputs to the Proof-of-Work hashing element.
The useful Work element should fulfil the following norms:
• Conversion of the uInput provided to the uOutput given out as a useful service for public network nodes while maintaining individual nodes’ data privacy.
• Must have reliable proof of particulars of the computing steps performed to convert a uInput to a uOutput.
• Must have a proof of the fact that the preceding block header had been recognised at the start of the useful work conversion from uInput to uOutput to support its speciality.
• The Minors of blockchain network should verify both uNonce proofs separately.
• Authorisation of the first proof should preserve the confidentiality of the uInput and uOutput.
Since the uNonce has evidence that the preceding block header was recognised at the beginning of the mining process and that useful work was accomplished, as introduced in the above norms, it helps to avert before-hand mining of uNonces. The miner then gives the uNonce as an input to the Proof-of-Work mining algorithm. The network certifies the newly created blocks’ authenticity only if the verified uNonce are in abidance to the model mentioned above rules and the Proof-of-Work mining numbers of foremost zeros. When a new block is successfully mined, more miners in the network can confirm that an uNonce certifies as input to mine a new block. A good miner will get a block reward similar to the normal bitcoin incentive concept. This system encourages miners to set up both elements, the useful work segment, and the Proof-of-Work hashing segment.
Conclusion: These techniques are still in the beginning stages of development, and a strong mathematical base would manifest to be a game-changer as to the extensive understanding of how and why the model is good enough but requires significant improvement for smooth execution.