Toward designing highly effective and efficient consensus mechanisms for blockchain-based applications

Consensus mechanism (CM) is the heart and soul of blockchain, for it allows nodes in a blockchain network to reach an agreement on the state of system execution. Among the CMs, the right for constructing the next new block is regarded as the most important one since it is required for the blockchain to grow so that transaction data can be recorded in it. Proof-of-work (PoW) is an efficient CM since it allows all the nodes to participate equally in the competition for the right. However, high energy consumption makes PoW less desirable for applications. Moreover, application-oriented blockchains should employ CMs that could reflect some main characteristics of the applications to facilitate the development of other mechanisms, such as the incentive mechanisms. Proof-of-contribution (PoC) is an effective, application-oriented CM since the right for constructing the next new block is determined by contributions made by the nodes and the node that has accumulated the highest contribution value (CV) gets the right. PoC is a general-purpose CM since the behavior of nodes can be characterized in the form of contributions. However, the deterministic nature of PoC as the result of ranking nodes based on CVs may lower efficiency since nodes could fail to function due to network delay, node failure or node’s simply dropping out of the network. This paper proposes to design highly effective and efficient CMs by integrating PoC with PoW, which we refer to as PoCW. In PoCW, nodes compete for the right for constructing the next new block based on PoW after being assigned different difficulty values (DVs) based on the ranking of their CVs. Since assigning DVs strictly according to the ranking of CVs would make PoCW resemble PoC while assigning the same DV to all the nodes would make PoCW the same as PoW, PoCW could be designed as a class of CMs through applying different DV assignment strategies to meet the effectiveness and efficiency requirements of a variety of applications. We can further apply the same principle at finer levels of granularity by dynamically grouping nodes along the ranking of CVs and then applying different DV assignment strategies to different groups. The paper will first describe a generic PoCW without involving node grouping and then present the design of a general PoCW through applying an example node grouping method to demonstrate the feasibility of PoCW as a general-purpose CM for blockchain-based applications. Experiments were also conducted to demonstrate the effectiveness and the efficiency of PoCW as well as its advantages over comparable CMs.