TY - GEN
T1 - SpaceMint
T2 - 22nd International Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security, 2018
AU - Park, Sunoo
AU - Kwon, Albert
AU - Fuchsbauer, Georg
AU - Gaži, Peter
AU - Alwen, Joël
AU - Pietrzak, Krzysztof
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© International Financial Cryptography Association 2018.
PY - 2018
Y1 - 2018
N2 - Bitcoin has become the most successful cryptocurrency ever deployed, and its most distinctive feature is that it is decentralized. Its underlying protocol (Nakamoto consensus) achieves this by using proof of work, which has the drawback that it causes the consumption of vast amounts of energy to maintain the ledger. Moreover, Bitcoin mining dynamics have become less distributed over time. Towards addressing these issues, we propose SpaceMint, a cryptocurrency based on proofs of space instead of proofs of work. Miners in SpaceMint dedicate disk space rather than computation. We argue that SpaceMint’s design solves or alleviates several of Bitcoin’s issues: most notably, its large energy consumption. SpaceMint also rewards smaller miners fairly according to their contribution to the network, thus incentivizing more distributed participation. This paper adapts proof of space to enable its use in cryptocurrency, studies the attacks that can arise against a Bitcoin-like blockchain that uses proof of space, and proposes a new blockchain format and transaction types to address these attacks. Our prototype shows that initializing 1 TB for mining takes about a day (a one-off setup cost), and miners spend on average just a fraction of a second per block mined. Finally, we provide a game-theoretic analysis modeling SpaceMint as an extensive game (the canonical game-theoretic notion for games that take place over time) and show that this stylized game satisfies a strong equilibrium notion, thereby arguing for SpaceMint ’s stability and consensus.
AB - Bitcoin has become the most successful cryptocurrency ever deployed, and its most distinctive feature is that it is decentralized. Its underlying protocol (Nakamoto consensus) achieves this by using proof of work, which has the drawback that it causes the consumption of vast amounts of energy to maintain the ledger. Moreover, Bitcoin mining dynamics have become less distributed over time. Towards addressing these issues, we propose SpaceMint, a cryptocurrency based on proofs of space instead of proofs of work. Miners in SpaceMint dedicate disk space rather than computation. We argue that SpaceMint’s design solves or alleviates several of Bitcoin’s issues: most notably, its large energy consumption. SpaceMint also rewards smaller miners fairly according to their contribution to the network, thus incentivizing more distributed participation. This paper adapts proof of space to enable its use in cryptocurrency, studies the attacks that can arise against a Bitcoin-like blockchain that uses proof of space, and proposes a new blockchain format and transaction types to address these attacks. Our prototype shows that initializing 1 TB for mining takes about a day (a one-off setup cost), and miners spend on average just a fraction of a second per block mined. Finally, we provide a game-theoretic analysis modeling SpaceMint as an extensive game (the canonical game-theoretic notion for games that take place over time) and show that this stylized game satisfies a strong equilibrium notion, thereby arguing for SpaceMint ’s stability and consensus.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85072873352&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-662-58387-6_26
DO - 10.1007/978-3-662-58387-6_26
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85072873352
SN - 9783662583869
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 480
EP - 499
BT - Financial Cryptography and Data Security - 22nd International Conference, FC 2018, Revised Selected Papers
A2 - Meiklejohn, Sarah
A2 - Sako, Kazue
PB - Springer Verlag
Y2 - 26 February 2018 through 2 March 2018
ER -