Conceitos essenciais
This paper proposes a proof-of-virtual-machine (PoVM) approach to replace the energy-intensive proof-of-work (PoW) in traditional blockchains, with the goal of reducing the carbon footprint.
Resumo
The paper presents a proof of technology for a low-carbon blockchain system that uses proof-of-virtual-machine (PoVM) instead of the traditional proof-of-work (PoW) approach. The key ideas are:
- Replace PoW with a lottery-based PoVM system, where miners are rewarded for providing virtual machine (VM) resources to execute customer jobs rather than performing computationally expensive PoW.
- Use off-the-shelf technologies like Docker, Kubernetes, and Skupper to manage and orchestrate the PoVM containers.
- Ensure the validity of job computations through techniques like redundant computations and checkpointing, rather than relying on PoW.
- Discuss technical gaps that need to be addressed, such as implementing a multiparty consensus-based lottery, job queue, and PoVM validation.
- Provide a basic proof-of-technology demonstration using coin flip computations running on Docker containers orchestrated by Kubernetes.
- Outline future directions, including precise CO2 analysis, adding multi-signature schemes, and leveraging iterative redundancy algorithms for fraud prevention.
The proposed approach aims to reduce the high energy consumption and carbon footprint associated with traditional PoW blockchains by utilizing general-purpose computations as a proxy for the PoW.