2022/11/12 by Canhui Chen, Chen, Canhui, Zerui Cheng +5 · 1 citation
Computer Science · #Blockchain Technology Applications and Security #Cryptography and Data Security #Distributed #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Mobile Crowdsensing and Crowdsourcing #Parallel #and Cluster Computing (cs.DC)
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2211.06669
openalex publication_date 2022/11/12 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Proof-of-Work (PoW) consensus mechanism is popular among current blockchain systems, which leads to an increasing concern about the tremendous waste of energy due to massive meaningless computation. To address this issue, we propose a novel and energy-efficient blockchain system, CrowdMine, which exploits useful crowdsourcing computation to achieve decentralized consensus. CrowdMine solves user-proposed computing tasks and utilizes the computation committed to the task solving process to secure decentralized on-chain storage. With our designed ``Proof of Crowdsourcing Work'' (PoCW) protocol, our system provides an efficient paradigm for computation and storage in a trustless and decentralized environment. We further show that the system can defend against potential attacks on blockchain, including the short-term 51% attack, the problem-constructing attack, and the solution-stealing attack. We also implement the system with 40 distributed nodes to demonstrate its performance and robustness. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first system that enables decentralized Proof of Useful Work (PoUW) with general user-proposed tasks posted in a permissionless and trustless network.