Paper 2020/673

LotMint: Blockchain Returning to Decentralization with Decentralized Clock

Wenbo MAO and Wenxiang WANG

Abstract

We present LotMint, a permissionless blockchain, with a purposely low set bar for Proof-of-Work (PoW) difficulty. Our objective is for personal computers, cloud virtual machines or containers, even mobile devices, and hopefully future IoT devices, to become the main, widely distributed, collectively much securer, fairer, more reliable and economically sustainable mining workforce for blockchains. An immediate question arises: how to prevent the permissionless network from being flooded of block dissemination traffic by a massive number of profit enthusiastic miners? We propose a novel notion of {\em Decentralized Clock/Time} (DC/DT) as global and logical clock/time which can be agreed upon as a consensus. Our construction of DC/DT practically uses distributed private clocks of the participation nodes. With DC/DT, a node upon creating or hearing a block can know how luckily short or unluckily long time for the block to have been mined and/or traveled through the network. They can ``time throttle'' a potentially large number of unluckily mined/travelled blocks. The luckier blocks passing through the time throttle are treated as time-tie forks with a volume being ``throttle diameter'' adjustably controlled not to congest the network. With the number of time-tie forks being manageable, it is then easy to break-tie elect a winner, or even to orderly queue a plural number of winners for a ``multi-core'' utilization of resource. We provide succinct and evident analyses of necessary properties for the LotMint blockchain including: decentralization, energy saving, safety, liveness, robustness, fairness, anti-denial-of-service, anti-sybil, anti-censorship, scaled-up transaction processing throughput and sped-up payment confirmation time.