Paper 2018/722

uMine: a Blockchain based on Human Miners

Henning Kopp, Frank Kargl, Christoph Bösch, and Andreas Peter

Abstract

Blockchain technology like Bitcoin is a rapidly growing field of research which has found a wide array of applications. However, the power consumption of the mining process in the Bitcoin blockchain alone is estimated to be at least as high as the electricity consumption of Ireland which constitutes a serious liability to the widespread adoption of blockchain technology. We propose a novel instantiation of a proof of human-work which is a cryptographic proof that an amount of human work has been exercised, and show its use in the mining process of a blockchain. Next to our instantiation there is only one other instantiation known which relies on indistinguishability obfuscation, a cryptographic primitive whose existence is only conjectured. In contrast, our construction is based on the cryptographic principle of multiparty computation (which we use in a black box manner) and thus is the first known feasible proof of human-work scheme. Our blockchain mining algorithm called uMine, can be regarded as an alternative energy-efficient approach to mining.

Metadata
Available format(s)
PDF
Category
Applications
Publication info
Published elsewhere. Major revision. ICICS 2018
Keywords
BlockchainApplied CryptographyPeer-to-PeerProof of Work
Contact author(s)
henning kopp @ uni-ulm de
History
2018-08-03: received
Short URL
https://ia.cr/2018/722
License
Creative Commons Attribution
CC BY

BibTeX

@misc{cryptoeprint:2018/722,
      author = {Henning Kopp and Frank Kargl and Christoph Bösch and Andreas Peter},
      title = {uMine: a Blockchain based on Human Miners},
      howpublished = {Cryptology ePrint Archive, Paper 2018/722},
      year = {2018},
      note = {\url{https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/722}},
      url = {https://eprint.iacr.org/2018/722}
}
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