Nakamoto Consensus with Verifiable Delay Puzzle

08/18/2019

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by   Jieyi Long, et al.

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This technical report summarizes our work-in-progress on a new consensus protocol based on verifiable delay function. First, we introduce the concept of verifiable delay puzzle (VDP), which resembles the hashing puzzle used in the PoW mechanism but can only be solved sequentially. We then present a VDP implementation based on Pietrzak's verifiable delay function. Further, we show that VDP can be combined with the Nakamoto consensus in a proof-of-stake protocol. We analyze the safety and liveness of the protocol, and show that compared to PoW, our proposal consumes much less energy; compared to BFT based consensus algorithms which usually place an upper limit on the number of consensus nodes, our proposal is much more scalable and can thus achieve a higher level of decentralization.