Foundations of Blockchain

Blockchain consensus

Ethereum nodes mine blocks for the blockchain in a similar way to Bitcoin by using a Proof of Work-based algorithm. A node that appends a block ensures that a sufficient amount of computation is done on the block using a hash function. The average block creation time is limited to around 12 seconds.

Ethereum uses a Proof of Work algorithm called Ethash, which is an ASIC-resistant algorithm developed to overcome the centralization of the mining process. The mining requires the generation of a large dataset from the pseudorandom cache before computing the hash. Since memory is used during this process, it is resistant to ASIC-based mining devices. The verification process can be performed with low memory because it only ...