Alternatives to Proof of Work
The PoW scheme in the context of cryptocurrency was first used in Bitcoin and served as a mechanism to provide assurance that a miner had completed the required amount of work to find a block. This process in return provided decentralization, security, and stability for the blockchain. This is the primary vehicle in Bitcoin for providing decentralized distributed consensus. PoW schemes are required to have a much-desired property called progress freeness, which means that the reward for consuming computational resources should be random and proportional to the contribution made by the miners. In this case, some chance of winning the block reward is given to even those miners who have comparatively less computational ...
Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.
Read now
Unlock full access