Equitable proof-of-work mining rewards
File(s)
Author(s)
Khalil, Ramy Abdelmageed Ebrahim
Type
Thesis
Abstract
We present Reward-All Nakamoto-Consensus (Reward-All), a Proof-of-Work cryptocurrency that rewards each miner with a number of coins that is directly proportional to its individual mining power, rather than in proportion to its relative share of the entire network’s mining power as done in Bitcoin. Unlike their Bitcoin counterparts, miners in Reward-All do not have to win the leader-election process to earn coins, and only lose earned coins after block reorganizations of a configurable minimum length occur. We present a detailed specification of Reward-All, along with a prototype implementation, and an evaluation of its practicality and efficiency. Additionally, we provide an analysis of the security of Reward-All, where mining is modeled as a Markov Decision Process, and the advantages of optimal mining strategies are quantified. Under reasonable configurations, Reward-All achieves near-perfect incentive compatibility, and near-zero censorship susceptibility, for adversarial mining shares up to 45%, while retaining the same chain quality as Bitcoin’s Nakamoto Consensus (Nakamoto). However, Reward-All pays for these advantages with a regression in subversion gain resilience compared to Nakamoto. Furthermore, under Reward-All’s approach, the growth rate of the total coin supply correlates closely with the growth rate of mining power invested in the network. This enables miners to mint coins at a stable hash-based cost of production, and enables all rewarded coins to correspond to an approximately equal number of hashing attempts on average. Consequently, depending on the network transaction-fees, Reward-All improves miners’ waiting times for rewards, and incentivizes forming mining pools smaller than required in Bitcoin for an equal level of reward stability. Moreover, rewards in Reward-All exhibit significantly lower variance for non-majority miners compared to Nakamoto, enabling unprecedented reward stability.
Version
Open Access
Date Issued
2022-06
Date Awarded
2022-10
Copyright Statement
Creative Commons Attribution NonCommercial Licence
License URL
Advisor
Dulay, Naranker
Sponsor
Imperial College London
Publisher Department
Computing
Publisher Institution
Imperial College London
Qualification Level
Doctoral
Qualification Name
Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)