The Greening of Blockchain Mining
A.W. Roscoe, Bangdao Chen
University College Oxford Blockchain Research Centre
The Blockhouse Technology Limited
We analyse the proof of work mining model and show how to simulate many of its properties in a form of proof of stake called Work your Stake. In doing so we create innovations on timing, branch prevention and achieving an unbiasable random oracle that will be useful in other Blockchain models and decentralised systems. At the time of writing (mid 2019) the best known public blockchains are maintained by proof of work, a protocol which is simultaneously magical and disastrous. We will see why it is magical later. The best-known objection to it is that proof of work wastes energy. Mining a block of the bitcoin blockchain currently means that the network has to compute a truly astronomical number of hashes: about 2.2*1022.